Optimized Propaganda with Bayesian Networks: Comment on "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models" - LessWrong

Derek Powell, Kara Weisman, and Ellen M. Markman's "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models: A Study of Beliefs Surrounding Vaccination Decisions" (a conference paper from CogSci 2018) represents an exciting advance in marketing research, showing how to use causal graphical models to study why ordinary people have the beliefs they do, and how to intervene to make them be less wrong. The specific case our authors examine is that of childhood vaccination decisions: some parents don't give their babies the recommended vaccines, because they're afraid that vaccines cause autism. (Not true.) This is pretty bad—not only are those unvaccinated kids more likely to get sick themselves, but declining vaccination rates undermine the population's herd immunity, leading to new outbreaks of highly-contagious diseases like the measles in regions where they were once eradicated. What's wrong with these parents, huh?! But that doesn't have to just be a rhetorical question—Powell et al. show how we can use statistics to make the rhetorical hypophorical and model specifically what's wrong with these people! Realistically, people aren't going to just have a raw, "atomic" dislike of vaccination for no reason: parents who refuse to vaccinate their children do so because they're (irrationally) afraid of giving their kids autism, and not afraid enough of letting their kids get infectious diseases. Nor are beliefs about vaccine effectiveness or side-effects uncaused, but instead depend on other beliefs. To unravel the structure of the web of beliefs, our authors got Amazon Mechanical Turk participants to take surveys about vaccination-related beliefs, rating statements like "Natural things are always better than synthetic alternatives" or "Parents should trust a doctor's advice even if it goes against their intuitions" on a 7-point Likert-like scale from "Strongly Agree" to "Strongly Disagree". Throwing some off-the-shelf Bayes-net structure-learning software at a trainin

x Optimized Propaganda with Bayesian Networks: Comment on "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models" — LessWrong Academic Papers Causality Deception Honesty Rationality Frontpage 106 Optimized Propaganda with Bayesian Networks: Comment on "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models" by Zack_M_Davis 29th Jun 2020 5 min read 10 106 Derek Powell, Kara Weisman, and Ellen M. Markman's "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models: A Study of Beliefs Surrounding Vaccination Decisions" (a conference paper from CogSci 2018 ) represents an exciting advance in marketing research,

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