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ceroon56's review against another edition
4.0
Rating is not so much because it was so good but that the story was so darn interesting. Nothing like a book that tells me something I didn’t know! (Oh, and it was a good book too)
iguessthisisme's review against another edition
2.0
Jill Lepore hooks you early on with her incredible writing style. But this isn't a story, or much of a history even, and it barely even hangs together. By the time I was seventy-five pages in, it felt like work to continue turning each page. From what I glean from this book, the truth is that there was never much of a story to the Simulmatics Corporation. This feels like Lepore stumbled onto some tantalizing information about this company and sensed an iceberg under the surface, and she composed a very exciting book proposal with the sure knowledge that her research and writing would lead to a treasure trove -- then she got into her research and writing and found there wasn't much there. You can feel her trying to weave something out of the nothing she unearthed with her research and it never really becomes any kind of whole.
sethsb's review against another edition
4.0
In 1952, the Eisenhower campaign ran a TV ad called "Ike for President" sung by cartoon characters that was wildly popular. The loser of that race, Adlai Stevenson, gave 30-minute lectures on economic principles and tried to win people over with reason. Americans chanted "We like Ike." Afterward, politicians wondered why more informed voters did not mean more votes. This became a social science experiment, like a germ that would grow beyond its Petri dish, becoming a machine fueled by data. Within the course of If Then, Jill Lepore examines the spread of information analytics across politics, war, and society.
When candidates sought out answers, an entourage of data scientists took on the research. Ithiel de Sola Pool, the brains, and Ed Greenfield, the charm, put their heads together to form Simulmatics. With an IBM 7090 and a sample of 3,000 simulated Americans based on polling data, the consultants came up with answers. For example, 'what effect would a speech for racial justice in the South have on black voter support?' By tallying up the numbers and writing reports, they were able to deliver advice to the Democratic campaign of John F. Kennedy. Simulmatics gave just enough advice that they could boast they got him elected and critics could complain that machines rigged the election.
As Johnson sent more troops to Vietnam, ARPA hired Simulmatics to take surveys and chart the data. Their computers were shipped to Saigon in wooden crates, salvaged by peasants to make shelters. Most of the employees who were interns from MIT. They wore blue safari suits and very few spoke Vietnamese. Managers showed up for a month or two like vacationers with briefcases and stayed in officer quarters. They sent out teams to conduct surverys that were so long the interviewees would leave halfway through. Their goal was to support strategy with numbers. They were a contractor and this was a social science laboratory. Body count was an easy number, hearts and minds were more elusive. One general predicted the last major battle had already been won. A White House official told the New York Times 'the war is over'. In January 1968, an analyst asked ARPA for time on the IBM 360 to calculate when the war would end. At the same time, the North Vietnamese were launching a push that would become known as the Tet Offensive.
Jill Lepore brings together the interesting and the important, taking time to remind the reader why these parts of history are relevant today. As she writes,
"Vietnam would be the test of McNamara's policy and of RAND and Simulmatics' behavioral science. Decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity, the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the 21st century, it would organize daily life, politics, war, commerce, everything."
The behavioral scientists who failed to win the war looked for a new line of work: informing the police. Their last gambit was to predict when riots would occur. They trained groups of interviewers to survey ghetto residents. Problems within the company combined with scandal to spell the end. Simulmatics did not last beyond the assassination of MLK and, by that point, it did not matter. The company disintegrated.
Simulmatics' weaponization of data was a disregard for ethics in scienice. The data gathering and synthesizing was costly, and never under budget. College students realized their universities were being used to support the police. To anti-war protestors, this was reprehensible. Pool was left defending his tactics against Noam Chomsky while the corporation that attracted protest had already folded. Computers run by social scientists continued to hum. What remained was a fragment of Johnson's great society reflected through J. C. R. Licklider's vision of a grand library: ARPANET. More lasting than protestable offenses was the lofty ambition; the future allowed Pool to remake his image into a digital prophet. He fought for privacy and deregulation and wrote books supporting freedom of speech.
There is a hint of a black swan in If Then, as if anyone looking at Simulmatics must have known that the internet would tie us together. In the 21st century, metadata and algorithms have us pinned with personalized content, gathered bit-by-bit starting in the 20th century. Simulmatics is worth investigating as a precursor and journalists who covered it deserve credit for holding opportunistic scientists accountable. The later Cambridge Analytica followed the same path, targeting messages to users. What voters saw as a new threat, Lepore reminds us, was hardly new. Many things happening in this book are loosely connected--like so many computers tapping into one hub--but we shouldn't take for granted the beginnings of our digital age. As if to make sense of a scatter plot, Lepore draws a trend line across the graph to show us the average. The momentum has been trending upward from the start and it's exponential.
When candidates sought out answers, an entourage of data scientists took on the research. Ithiel de Sola Pool, the brains, and Ed Greenfield, the charm, put their heads together to form Simulmatics. With an IBM 7090 and a sample of 3,000 simulated Americans based on polling data, the consultants came up with answers. For example, 'what effect would a speech for racial justice in the South have on black voter support?' By tallying up the numbers and writing reports, they were able to deliver advice to the Democratic campaign of John F. Kennedy. Simulmatics gave just enough advice that they could boast they got him elected and critics could complain that machines rigged the election.
As Johnson sent more troops to Vietnam, ARPA hired Simulmatics to take surveys and chart the data. Their computers were shipped to Saigon in wooden crates, salvaged by peasants to make shelters. Most of the employees who were interns from MIT. They wore blue safari suits and very few spoke Vietnamese. Managers showed up for a month or two like vacationers with briefcases and stayed in officer quarters. They sent out teams to conduct surverys that were so long the interviewees would leave halfway through. Their goal was to support strategy with numbers. They were a contractor and this was a social science laboratory. Body count was an easy number, hearts and minds were more elusive. One general predicted the last major battle had already been won. A White House official told the New York Times 'the war is over'. In January 1968, an analyst asked ARPA for time on the IBM 360 to calculate when the war would end. At the same time, the North Vietnamese were launching a push that would become known as the Tet Offensive.
Jill Lepore brings together the interesting and the important, taking time to remind the reader why these parts of history are relevant today. As she writes,
"Vietnam would be the test of McNamara's policy and of RAND and Simulmatics' behavioral science. Decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity, the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the 21st century, it would organize daily life, politics, war, commerce, everything."
The behavioral scientists who failed to win the war looked for a new line of work: informing the police. Their last gambit was to predict when riots would occur. They trained groups of interviewers to survey ghetto residents. Problems within the company combined with scandal to spell the end. Simulmatics did not last beyond the assassination of MLK and, by that point, it did not matter. The company disintegrated.
Simulmatics' weaponization of data was a disregard for ethics in scienice. The data gathering and synthesizing was costly, and never under budget. College students realized their universities were being used to support the police. To anti-war protestors, this was reprehensible. Pool was left defending his tactics against Noam Chomsky while the corporation that attracted protest had already folded. Computers run by social scientists continued to hum. What remained was a fragment of Johnson's great society reflected through J. C. R. Licklider's vision of a grand library: ARPANET. More lasting than protestable offenses was the lofty ambition; the future allowed Pool to remake his image into a digital prophet. He fought for privacy and deregulation and wrote books supporting freedom of speech.
There is a hint of a black swan in If Then, as if anyone looking at Simulmatics must have known that the internet would tie us together. In the 21st century, metadata and algorithms have us pinned with personalized content, gathered bit-by-bit starting in the 20th century. Simulmatics is worth investigating as a precursor and journalists who covered it deserve credit for holding opportunistic scientists accountable. The later Cambridge Analytica followed the same path, targeting messages to users. What voters saw as a new threat, Lepore reminds us, was hardly new. Many things happening in this book are loosely connected--like so many computers tapping into one hub--but we shouldn't take for granted the beginnings of our digital age. As if to make sense of a scatter plot, Lepore draws a trend line across the graph to show us the average. The momentum has been trending upward from the start and it's exponential.
brettneese's review against another edition
5.0
Wasn't what I was expecting, but that's a good thing. Jill Lepore brilliantly tells a fascinating and compelling political history through the lens of the Simulmatics Corporation. I am fairly well versed on history and philosophy of technology, so the issues she raises are certainly not foreign to me, but the history from this perspective certainly was. I enjoyed hearing the history of the 50's and 60's I was mostly already familiar with from an entirely new perspective, and the inclusion of quotes from texts from that era challenged my notion of the context surrounding contemporary debates about technology and politics.
I read the audiobook version, which she narrates herself, which is also a major plus for me, and the chapters of the audiobook were cut into digestible chunks of < 1 hour. Sometimes her "male voice" was a bit too strong, but it added some nice liveliness to the story that kept me engaged. Previously I had only listened to her podcast, but I will be sure to read more of her books in the future!
I read the audiobook version, which she narrates herself, which is also a major plus for me, and the chapters of the audiobook were cut into digestible chunks of < 1 hour. Sometimes her "male voice" was a bit too strong, but it added some nice liveliness to the story that kept me engaged. Previously I had only listened to her podcast, but I will be sure to read more of her books in the future!
gajeam's review against another edition
3.0
God-tier writing but the story of Simulmatics itself just didn’t hold my attention. Also, the whole book is proof that you can write about a field dominated by white men without only featuring white male voices.
sillypunk's review against another edition
3.0
Bit luddite-y and a bit disappointing https://blogendorff.com/2021/01/24/book-review-if-then/
melkhanlon's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.0
Very dense to start with copious amounts of romantic/family details about the key simulmatics player. I found this later useful in providing some context of character quality and type. Concluding remarks left a sour taste with respect to negligence on internet and data regulation. Something still lacking in policy today, that was identified and dismissed in late 1900s. I very much enjoyed the writing and presentation of content.
encgolsen's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
An intriguing glimpse at the earliest days of data science and attempts to apply it to track, predict and manipulate human behavior. The Simulmatics Corporation was ahead of its time in terms of its goals and its complete lack of ethical considerations; the story of the company's rise and fall touches on themes of privacy and ethics that are more relevant than ever today.
melodyriggs's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This was an interesting read about the first company to try to use data to predict outcomes. While there were times I was a little fatigued with too many details- on the whole, I found a lot to chew on in the ways we’ve come to manipulate data since the 1960s. You could say who could’ve guessed, but the men at Simulmatics could’ve for sure. They were ahead of their time and I wonder what some of them would think of our world now were they still living.