Every now and then, a really interesting piece rolls through my Twitter feed; earlier this week, it was a Wired piece about the growing use of “A/B testing” on the web:
Welcome, guinea pigs. Because if you’ve spent any time using the web today — and if you’re reading this, that’s a safe bet — you’ve most likely already been an unwitting subject in what’s called an A/B test. It’s the practice of performing real-time experiments on a site’s live traffic, showing different content and formatting to different users and observing which performs better.
The article notes that A/B testing (explained in further detail here) has been around for a little more than a decade, most notably by giants like Google and Amazon, who use the procedure to test and tweak virtually every aspect of their online experience.
What fascinated me, though, was the discussion of how A/B testing might make the leap into physical space – and more specifically, into the realm of policymaking:
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” wrote Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in 1932, “that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”In the realm of politics A/B testing makes an unexpected argument for things like block grants and state, as opposed to federal, power. As Silicon Valley’s A/B devotees can increasingly attest, not everything is best solved by discussion and debate. Differences in the way policy is implemented and issues are addressed at the state level make for a rough 50-way A/B test–yielding empirical data that can often go where partisan thought-experiments, and even debate at its most productive (but nonetheless theoretical) cannot.
Of course, the article had me at “data”; but would this work in elections – and if so, how?
Full Article: A/B Testing: Could, Would It Work in Elections? – Election Academy.