30 ms·

People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

• aalleavitch 8y ago
  We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.”
  • alexmat 8y ago
    Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain! "The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1] [1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html
    • danharaj 8y ago
      # of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.
      • arturh 8y ago
        The gene is the unit of selection.
        • folli 8y ago
          The current fashion is subgenes (domains): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/
        • phkahler 8y ago
          No, the collection of genes is. There are exactly zero individual genes roaming around replicating in isolation.
          • marcosdumay 8y ago
            Sexual reproduction uncorrelates the selective pressures over each gene, and each small set of them (with larger sets being possible the larger a population the species has). The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.
          • lisper 8y ago
            This is a common misconception. The collection is the unit of replication, but the gene is nonetheless the unit of selection. This argument was laid out in excruciating detail by Dawkins, but the TL;DR is that reproductive fitness can only ever be measured relative to some environment, and all the other genes in a replicative unit are (part of) the environment for a gene and its alleles.
            • phkahler 8y ago
              Collection, chromosome, Gene, base pair. Selection happens at all these levels.
              • lisper 8y ago
                Nope. Selection can only happen at the level of something that has an effect on the phenotype. That's the definition of a gene.
          • rjbwork 8y ago
      • Radim 8y ago
        Probability of propagation is just a proxy for consuming energy gradients more efficiently.
        • darkmighty 8y ago
          Life can be material-constrained instead of energy-constrained (I know there's E=mc^2, but this may not be technologically feasible hence irrelevant). Environmental domination is more fundamental than energy source tapping imo (you can imagine life in systems that don't even have precise energy analogues, like conway's game of life) -- that is, dominating whatever the basic resources are (space, materials, energy, etc).
    • cafard 8y ago
      There is something curious about posters on a techie site lauding the superiority of the hunter-gatherer life.
      • alexmat 8y ago
        It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.
        • aalleavitch 8y ago
          Technology is often the solution to technology.
        • notabee 8y ago
          The people immersed in technology should also be the ones to best understand both its potential and its limitations. Anyone who has dealt with the unpredictability and pitfalls in maintaining human-created complex software systems should also easily intuit our limits in understanding or controlling other even more complex systems such as the planet's biosphere.
      • s-shellfish 8y ago
        I imagine a lot of them are starting to have families. What resonates in background information provides a foundational structure, and often establishes direction in opinion.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        What's so curious about it? I'd expect an average techie to be able to think about this topic on their own and comprehend various perspectives.
  • cubano 8y ago
    Yet people have done and are doing it on a daily basis.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Do they now? Or are they just successful in areas where the corporation does not care, or even notice? To paraphrase Eliezer's famous quote about AI - the Corporation does not hate you, nor does it love you; you're just a potential revenue source, and as long as it believes you'll net it something, it'll let you have your way.
  • nkrisc 8y ago
    I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains." I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them. Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.
    • athenot 8y ago
      That's an intersting point. Perhaps things would be more level if a conflict between an individual would be settled by selecting one RANDOM employee from that company (not the super ninja expert in the narrow field at hand), and have them battle it out in a lower court / arbitration.
      • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
        No, just do like you do with children who sign contracts, invalidate any obligations the child has to the adult, but the adult is still bound to any obligations they have, and punish the adult for trying to take advantage of the child. Ideally, the ability for individuals to sign contracts with corporations should be forbidden. Maybe a single 1 person corporation that doesn't involve a lawyer either direct or as a contractor.
        • marcosdumay 8y ago
          I don't think the world could function without contracts. I get into a restaurant, I order some food. That's a contract where I get into the obligation of paying, and they get into the obligation of serving the food. It's much more likely that the justice system needs a complete rework.
          • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
            You would still have contracts, they would be limited to being between people of similar power, and a lot stronger protections for someone being taken advantage of.
      • 8y ago
  • 52-6F-62 8y ago
    With you 100% on this one. Your last illustration there reminds me a little of this: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up-in-immigration-court https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up... >>> His name is Johan. He drank a bottle of milk and played with a purple ball as he waited for the immigration judge, The Associated Press reported. John W. Richardson, the judge at the Phoenix courthouse, said he was "embarrassed to ask" if the defendant understood the proceedings. "I don't know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law," he told Johan's attorney.
    • Spooky23 8y ago
      That’s isn’t a matter of smart vs dumb. That is a farcical process subverting the judiciary to abuse someone’s rights. If the judge had integrity he would resign or be disbarred.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        • Spooky23 8y ago
          He is asking an infant who is incapable of speech whether he understands legal rights. That’s an insult to the concept of justice.
          • jrs235 8y ago
            >That’s an insult to the concept of justice. Agreed. Unfortunately our justice system has been turned into a legal system. Legalities are more important than justice and it's sickening.
            • ink_13 8y ago
              What? "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
  • s-shellfish 8y ago
    I think lots of people have been aware for a long time that there's a big gap between the individual understanding of what we can perceive machines (and institutions, philosophies based on their mechanical functioning) can do, versus what they do do. It's just when you are caught up in it, you can't afford to think about it. You have to both be a part of it and not allow the responsibility of knowing you influence the system - therefore don't have the capacity to reason about the consequences of every single action - crush you. It's more like you are the bear and you are trying to take care of a baby. There's the idea that you are just this tiny, little singular organism in comparison to the whole, but you aren't. Everything we do has consequences, everything we do directs systems. If you think some things you do just don't matter, you are missing some perspective.
  • mrlala 8y ago
    >We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Not really, it's just that every single thing in the world that we have created is so incredibly complex that 99.99999% of people can't be specialized in more than one or two things. When you dive into the details of any industry it's just crazy complex. So yeah, we're dumb in the sense that no one person can even come close to managing all the systems we've created.. but that is an impossible metric.
  • olef_ 8y ago
    Execs of MNCs can be "nudged" too to do the right thing. That finding is one of reasons Thaler deserves his Nobel. Read his book.
    • dredmorbius 8y ago
      MNCs?
      • splendidtube 8y ago
        Multinational corporations
  • api 8y ago
    It's not just technology per se. We are dumb when it comes to understanding the behavior of any complex system with lots of emergent properties and feedback loops. I doubt the Roman Empire was understandable by its leaders either. We are also fairly dumb when it comes to understanding things like ecosystems, genetic regulatory networks, the climate, the brain, etc. Those are all systems that have similar properties.
  • barrkel 8y ago
    And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together. At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists. Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage. Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy. Not an easy circle to square.
    • sandworm101 8y ago
      It also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is the only way to stop individuals bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
      • mhb 8y ago
        Well it takes collective action to decide what to ban.
        • sandworm101 8y ago
          >> collective action to decide No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead. Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.
  • amorphid 8y ago
    > We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. I prefer not to think like that. I'd say we're doing our best to navigate hard problems, and it's not yet clear how to do things more effectively. Worst case scenario we're acting dumb, and I'd argue that is kind of a useless statement. We're acting, and we can do better, so put some time into working on doing better.
  • walterstucco 8y ago
    Are you sure that is the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals and not our perception of it? My grandparents lived most of their life under the menace of a nuclear holocaust, but when they were born the electric power system was still in infancy and they had no electricity whatsoever in their house. Going back centuries, the Ishtar Gate was built so that people arriving to Babilonia would be scared I think that we are more scared by what we don't know that by what we can't manage The world IS hard, but we're also very dumb We know smoking gives cancer, but we still smoke anyway. We know cars pollute the environment, but we ride them anyway. etc. etc. etc.
  • noonespecial 8y ago
    Its worse. The baby doesn't even know that its supposed to be afraid of the bear.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • peacetreefrog 8y ago
    "One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own." 1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question. 2. I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful. As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail. What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? Nothing. 3. It's not like there is just one monolithic corporation. There are many, and they have various interests, capabilities and incentives. Usually they're competing with each other. Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them. E.g. see Acorns, Wealthfront, or hundreds of apps that help people use their phones less.
    • enraged_camel 8y ago
      >>Our hardware isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend your own interests than the individual? Organizations who have similar levels of resources and expertise as those who are infringing upon the individual’s interests, obviously. Otherwise it ends up being a David vs Goliath situation.
    • s73v3r_ 8y ago
      "1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question." Someone who actually knows something about the topic in question? It is highly in the interests of any person to have both a plentiful and safe food supply, and safe, breathable air and safe, drinkable water. Pesticides constantly straddle this line; how much pollution is acceptable for food production, but still leaving the air and water safe? Do you honestly expect any random person to be able to make the correct choice in that situation? No. That's why we have experts in that field which study the effects of these chemicals, and the impact they have on the environment, and come to the conclusion of what's safe or not. Another similar issue: One's actions do not exist in a vacuum. There's a recent story of some farmers spraying a certain herbicide to protect their crops from pigweed. However, not every farmer in the area is using it, or the herbicide resistant crops. The thing about spraying is that it goes in the air, and tends not to recognize property lines. The herbicide kills the crops on the neighboring farms. So while the original farmer who sprayed acted in their individual interest, they most definitely did not act in the interest of society in general, and clearly not in the interest of their neighbors. "I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful." No, we just want government to actually act in people's interests. "As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail." Yes, you broke the law, and so you must face the consequences. And unless you're Al Capone, you're not going to jail. Please stop parroting this ridiculous argument. "What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? " What happens if you stop paying the balance on your Samsung phone because you switched? "Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them." I have huge doubts that many of them do this, and I have huge doubts that they are effective in this.
  • andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Placing refugee children as young as one in front of immigration courts, in seriousness, speaks volumes to this.
• stephengillie 8y ago
  Life is hard, it's harder if you're stupid. - John Wayne
  • amelius 8y ago
    Yeah, except if you're too stupid to even notice how hard life really is.
  • qaq 8y ago
    I actually often see the opposite less intelligent people are often carefree and more happy.
    • blueprint 8y ago
      Being intelligent is not exactly the same as being smart, and no matter how intelligent you may be, if you cannot control the activities of the effects that stick to your consciousness after the fact of what has happened to you in the past, you can't preserve your own true self for a long time, especially in this modern age.
    • ManlyBread 8y ago
      This is only true up until a point where they have to deal with something they don't understand.
    • paidleaf 8y ago
      Ignorance is bliss. Quotes are like bible passages. There is one for every occasion and every perspective. Given one quote, you can find an equally poignant and contradictory quote. Time and tide wait for no man! Slow and steady wins the race! This is why I cringe when I see people leading their lives based on quotes.
      • stephengillie 8y ago
        Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. -Oscar Wilde A witty saying proves nothing -Voltaire
    • 8y ago
• francisofascii 8y ago
  There was an interesting NPR Planet Money episode about Richard Thaler back in November. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/11/01/561421807/episode-803-nudge-nudge-nobel https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/11/01/561421807/epis...
• jabgrabdthrow 8y ago
  When we heated the pot it didn’t become less cold, it became more hot. Could anyone even blag that “cold” is real? Like
• ghosterrific 8y ago
  Hubris. Of course people are dumb.
• howeyc 8y ago
  This looks to be a bunch of discussion around receiving the Nobel prize. Any pointers to where to find the information/studies that won him the prize. What people should/shouldn't be doing when making financial decisions. For instance, there was a reference to the fact that people "should ignore sunk costs" but don't. What are some other things to watch out for, and the reasons to do so?
  • ghaff 8y ago
    Thaler has written a couple of books. Nudge (with Cass Sunstein) focuses on how the "right" decisions can be "nudged" by setting up appropriate decision frameworks. Misbehaving is more of a personal history of how he got to behavioral decision theory. I particularly enjoyed that because I had a couple classes with him when he was working on these ideas early on.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
    Here's the lecture he's gave for the Nobel: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/thaler-lecture.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la... If you're looking for information on nudges, check this: http://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2013/08/nudge-database-ix.html http://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2013/08/nudge-... It looks like they've stopped updating it but it has all sorts of economic research on nudges in it. Beware that some of this research is debated though.
    • wgyn 8y ago
      There's another section of the Nobel site that provides background on the work, both a popular version and an advanced version. The advanced version amounts to a fairly substantive literature review. In general, you can find both documents for all Nobel Prizes, and the writing is very good. Popular: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/popular.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la... Advanced: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2017/advanced.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...
• known 8y ago
  It's hard due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_interdependence
• tw1010 8y ago
  The negation of the former is true but the latter is also true.
• ppeetteerr 8y ago
  This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some away. As voters, we have to recognize this duality of our system and embrace it. It's our only way to control the people we elect.
  • digi_owl 8y ago
    I seem to recall running into a claim that the original idea of the republicans was that the government would be a check against coercion, be it physical, emotional, economic, or otherwise.
    • yosito 8y ago
      Seems the current Republican establishment is the exact opposite of that ideal.
      • ythn 8y ago
        Libertarians are the new advocates for small government. Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal) Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)
        • xd2024 8y ago
          snap Yep, this is going in my cringe compilation.
          • pretendscholar 8y ago
            Keep /pol/ memes on /pol/.
        • 8y ago
• kumartanmay 8y ago
  If behavioural economists are so good at predicting human behaviour, why aren’t they popular among consumer facing companies? Why don’t such companies have a special position for behaviourial evonomists? Why none of the behaviourial Economists have ever tried starting up?
  • haskellandchill 8y ago
    Some companies do. AirBnB had an economist at one point I recall.
  • myth_buster 8y ago
    Your assumption _why aren’t they popular among consumer facing companies_ is incorrect. Almost all UX and product development takes into consideration. Ex: gamification, pricing, freemium model etc.
  • jcutrell 8y ago
    To be honest, this is kind of my hope for a future job. I've wanted to practice behavior economics meets technological innovation for a long time now - but you're right, there doesn't seem to be a demand for this.
    • Ironchefpython 8y ago
      > but you're right, there doesn't seem to be a demand for this You mean outside the entire advertising industry? Now you might argue that advertising companies are more focused on selling ads to clients than optimizing the ad experience for victims, but it's an entire sector of the economy focused on exploiting the poor decision-making abilities of humans.
      • jcutrell 8y ago
        Yes, I think the lack of demand is for non-exploitative roles. Of course, as long as we have had enough understanding that we can affect others, there has been a demand for exploitation through bias. I think the hope here is that we would create positions that allow BE to benefit others AND businesses by helping people make better decisions. It sounds a bit utopian, but it's certainly not impossible that everyone could benefit from people making decisions that are beneficial to their well-being.
• abetusk 8y ago
  Boy does it take a while to get to the main topic of the title. From the article/podcast: ... THALER: Well, first of all, when we use this phrase libertarian paternalism, we’re using libertarian as an adjective. And so we’re trying to say we’re going to design policies that don’t force anyone to do anything. So the claim that we’re trying to tell people what to do, or force them to do things, is just completely wrong. We are also not trying to tell them to do what we think is smart. We’re trying to help people do what they want to do. I like to use G.P.S. as an analogy of what we’re trying to do. So, I have a terrible sense of direction. And Google Maps is a lifesaver for me. Now, if I want to go visit you, I can plug in your address, and suppose I’m walking across the park, and I see, “Oh, there’s a softball game over there. I think I’ll go watch that for a while,” Google Maps doesn’t scold me. It will re-compute a new route if I’ve gone a bit out of my way. It doesn’t suggest addresses to me. It just suggests a route. And if there’s a traffic jam, it suggests maybe you should alter your route. So, we don’t think people are dumb. We think the world is hard. I mean, figuring out how much to save for retirement is a really hard cognitive problem that very few economists have solved for themselves. And it’s not only cognitively hard, it involves delay of gratification, which people find hard. It’s just like navigating in a strange city is hard. So, why not try to help? When I first was working with the U.K. Behavioral Insight Team, the first “Nudge unit,” the phrase I kept saying in every meeting with some minister was, “If you want to get people to do something, make it easy. Remove the barriers.” That’s what we’re about. ...
  • jerf 8y ago
    "suppose I’m walking across the park, and I see, “Oh, there’s a softball game over there. I think I’ll go watch that for a while,” Google Maps doesn’t scold me." I've noticed just in the past few days an update has been pushed so that now every time Google has to recalculate the route, instead just saying the new directions "turn right on third street", now it says "OK, turn right on third street", and I find myself having a somewhat negative reaction to the OK, like, yes, of course it's fucking OK you stupid computer, I just did it. I think it may be an uncanny valley effect; when the computer just blindly told me the next turn after recalculation, I treated it like a tool and wasn't offended that it was giving me output in reaction to my unexpected input. With the addition of "OK" prefixing the new announcement, suddenly it's taken a half-step towards being more human and conversational, and now my brain can't help but run it through my human conversation templates, and none of them are giving me a very friendly interpretation of the "OK" for the scenario "Someone told you what you should do, you silently did something else without telling them you were going to, so they said 'OK, do this thing instead'." My brain hears sarcasm, like "OK fine make this turn instead", or exasperation, or something like that. Especially as my current commute has a place where I'm dodging around some construction that Google just hasn't picked up on so I get three "OKs" in about a minute, and my brain says "ah, that must be increasing exasperation with you". Obviously, as I've described it to you this way, I intellectually and rationally know that nothing has changed other than the simple addition of a single word announcing a recalculation. But that doesn't invalidate the processing I'm getting from the rest of my brain. It just means I can identify why I'm reacting the way I'm reacting. Many other people will not be so introspective. Which, getting back on topic, shows how hard all this stuff can be to get right.
• dugluak 8y ago
  sometimes some people purposely create hard systems for others for their own benefit.
  • expertentipp 8y ago
    The competition for resources, influence, safety, and sexual partners is an attrition warfare. Try working in more than two countries in the same year and preparing the tax declaration becomes an impossible task. Those with power or money don’t even see their tax own declarations. Local politician or some significant figure gets beaten - all media scream for justice, prosecutors investigate, courts process the case. Average Joe gets beaten - welcome the medical expenses, nobody cares, don’t even bother with the police procedures. Freaking frontend development - HTML was designed as permissive so that anyone can put together their silly website. Since Google, Facebook, and Microsoft took over it’s among the most frustrating domains to work on, and so on...
  • hanshan 8y ago
    >The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. -John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975)
• jcutrell 8y ago
  B.E. is a subject I'm incredibly excited about. I'm glad to see this at the top of YC today. Every (somewhat major) decision I'm making now, I'm constantly reminding myself of various biases and silliness that I participate in unwillingly (or even sometimes willingly). I would say this study has been immensely helpful, and Thaler is a huge contributor to this for me. (Freakonomics, also, has been a great learning resource.) For anyone interested in this subject, I recommend Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. (You'd think I should get a referral bonus as often as I talk about this book.) It quite literally changed my life. Of course, Nudge is the other juggernaut in the field. In fact, if anyone is particularly interested, I'd love to chat. Profile has contact details.
  • mattnewport 8y ago
    Behavioral Economics falls prey to the same kinds of over simplifications it was a reaction to in regular economics. There are useful insights to be gained from both over simplifications but it's also good to remain aware of their flaws. To over simplify myself, traditional economics starts from the assumption that people are rational and then tends to over simplify the way they reason and the models of the world they reason about; behavioral economics questions whether people are rational and 'demonstrates' they are not compared to over simplified models of the world they reason about. A simple example is the "default choice" effect. The standard explanation is that people are too lazy to check a box. A more sophisticated explanation would be that people infer information from the default they are presented with and allow it to influence their decision based on their assumption that the form creator is well informed and looking out for their interests. There is in general an under appreciation in behavioral economics that people are likely being more rational than the over simplified models they are benchmarking them against. There are lots of examples of this in the most widely known results.
    • jcutrell 8y ago
      I think a "good" behavioral economist would not explain exactly why, but instead provide theories with as much data to describe why those theories exist. A trial shows that people often exhibit behavior A. Why they exhibit behavior A may be complicated. In your example, there's a sense of authority and conforming to a norm that can be used to describe those behaviors. But there's also the cognitive barrier (which we call lazy) that requires someone to exert mental effort to change away from a default. It's not that one is wrong and the other is right. All of these may be right. But B.E.'s best contribution to society isn't to explain so much of _why_ we act in these ways - but instead to accept that despite our desires or perspectives of rationality, we do act in these ways. Understanding the "why" may help us to make better decisions, certainly; however, being too prescriptive about "why" may lead us down the wrong path.
• curo 8y ago
  I know this is off-topic, but does anyone know if these interviews are scripted? It feels like their reading their back-and-forth banter to each other. (Nothing wrong with that.)
• skadamat 8y ago
  I would really really encourage everyone here to watch Alan Kay's recent talks on how poorly we understand systems and why it's critical we get better at managing them. Some good ones: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R2jH4PQEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R2jH4PQEo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work and I'd really encourage them to put them aside and deeply understand his points + context. The programming parts aren't ever the point, he's deeply interested in how as humans we improve our ability to collaboratively manage systems.
  • asdffdsa321 8y ago
    But can he solve a whiteboard coding question in 30 minutes?
    • jonsen 8y ago
      He will get away with small talk.
      • stingraycharles 8y ago
        Ok normally I don’t approve of these types of comments on HN, but this was witty. For those who do not get the reference, Alan Kay is the inventor of SmallTalk: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
        • aantix 8y ago
          I love how you revealed that you dislike joke comments on HN and unintentionally killed it at the same time.
          • stingraycharles 8y ago
            Didn’t intent on killing the joke, I was hoping it would allow more people to appreciate it. But apparently I failed at that. :)
• sametmax 8y ago
  The word being hard does not justify the success of reality tv, tabloids, lotery, music that is forgotten the next year or smoking. Who do you think has the most chance to buy a lotery ticket. Somebody with 130 or 90 IQ ?
  • opportune 8y ago
    It's arguably pretty poor design if the world is only livable for people in the top 2.5% of intelligence (>130 IQ)
    • sametmax 8y ago
      High intelligence is nowhere closed to be the most important factor to be successful in our society, gene propagation wise. Or being happy. It's merely a tool.
      • eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        > gene propagation wise Can we avoid the social darwinism, please?
        • sametmax 8y ago
          Can we avoid the godwin point please ?
• gdubs 8y ago
  Reminded of this timeless Carl Sagan quote: "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
  • enraged_camel 8y ago
    Asimov’s Foundation series is an excellent commentary on this very phenomenon. One of the antagonists is a galactic empire that is technologically advanced, but has been stagnating and decaying slowly as those in power start viewing scientists with disdain and distrust. Over time the empire loses the ability to develop new technology, and ends up with those who can only maintain/repair existing technology (which eventually becomes so old that it is scrapped).
    • bitwize 8y ago
      I'm a bit reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who know how to fly and fight with advanced spaceships/mechs, but not how to repair them or how they work. Except in that case it's because their patron race, the Protoculture, deliberately kept them dependent; Protoculture factories supplied as many ships and weapons as the Zentraedi might need, meanwhile, the average Zentraedi was kept at about a five-year-old human's level of cognitive development. (After Zentraedi culture integrated with human culture (thanks to a frickin' idol singer), adult Zentraedi were at cognitive parity with adult humans.) All of which makes you wonder: on actual Earth, is there a class of tech-company Morlocks keeping the disposable-income Eloi dependent with their endless supply of disposable gadgets?
      • wavefunction 8y ago
        The Zentraedi were cloned super-soldiers designed to serve the Protoculture and nothing else. Then the Protoculture lost control of their weapons. Lin Meimei I guess awakened the emotions they'd never required nor experienced before.
      • 1996 8y ago
        Good catch! It reminded me the same thing, Macross. There is indeed something keeping working class humans dependants: a focus on growth at all costs (including population growth). It is pervasive (the ideology is reinforced with ads) and makes you desire for example the latest iPhone X. With a permanent growth, the basic problem is all humans are still born with a dependancy on housing and food (and other fancier things) that are in short supply. To attain these, humans need to work. Their work is used not just to maintain the basics, but to fuel growth. Some people (mostly millenials) have found a solution: leave cheap, remain childless. It causes many people to freak out about the economy, the birth rate, and how more immigration is needed to maintain growth. People don't really want that, and end up voting funny.
• remusrm 8y ago
  People are damn dumb, ignorant and oblivious! I also notice a trend not be be curious and inquisitive and that is very damaging!
• cvaidya1986 8y ago
  I reject the tyranny of OR.
• WillPostForFood 8y ago
  There are 25 countries where the average IQ is under 70, so it is both, and unfortunately the world is getting increasingly harder.
  • bbeonx 8y ago
    IQ is a meaningless measurement in this case.
  • rc_hadoken 8y ago
    Can you give me sources? Would the people from these countries be exposed to the content being described in the article?
  • anticensor 8y ago
    How do you measure "difficulty" of the world?
• raywalters 8y ago
  Having worked front line technical support, I have to disagree. People are indeed dumb, many choose to stay that way.
  • expertentipp 8y ago
    It’s as if a person working in geriatric care claimed thet people are old. I rarely call or contact the support, the though of being treated as a dumb person make me solve the problem myself of abandon the service/product instead.
    • relic 8y ago
      Well to be fair a lot of people contacting a front-line service center for a non-specialized product/service can't even articulate their problem accurately, if at all. I'm sure it'd be pretty easy to get jaded about people after hearing "I don't know if it's on or not, it just doesn't work...fix it" enough times.
      • Klathmon 8y ago
        That person calling in more than likely knows significantly more than you about some other topic, and that's the point. Someone calling in that doesn't know the difference between the PC tower and the monitor and doesn't care to learn isn't "stupid" any more than you are stupid for not knowing an alternator from an AC compressor, and chances are you won't remember even if shown once or twice because you pay someone else to know and maintain/fix that stuff.
        • russdpale 8y ago
          Yeh but what would the mechanic think if I didn't know the keys had to be in the ignition? Such are the level of questions you field at First level tech support.
          • Klathmon 8y ago
• raywalters 8y ago
  Having worked front line tech support, I have to disagree. People are inherently dumb, and choose to stay that way in many cases.
  • rc_hadoken 8y ago
    pats back Indeed, but you might be missing the forest for the trees.
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > People are inherently dumb, and choose to stay that way in many cases This is called optimisation and is in most cases okay. I choose to be dumb about cars. I ask specialists dumb questions and expect them to give me useful answers. Computers are similarly ancillary to many people’s core value added.
  • Spivak 8y ago
    Maybe it would be better to say that describing a person as ignorant without a scope rarely makes sense. I mean I've worked with literal rocket scientists that can't figure out how to attach a PDF to an email. I would have a hard time describing them as 'dumb'. And don't even get me started on trying to help doctors and surgeons when I worked in medical. Just because we might find something easy or 'intuitive' after spending most of our lives in front of computer doesn't mean it's actually easy.
  • aswanson 8y ago
    Your physician, airline pilot, CFO, or lawyer could most likely easily point out the same about you, for a given context.
  • lwelyk 8y ago
    I'm sure your car mechanic, doctor, electrician, plumber, etc feel the same about you. You can't know how to do everything.
    • anticensor 8y ago
      The opposing view is also true: You cannot ignore everything.
• nathias 8y ago
  and the world is hard(er) because people are dumb
• captainbland 8y ago
  The world isn't that hard, some people just like to hoarde resources.
  • loa-in-backup 8y ago
    And the incentive for this is emotional, to the detriment of rational needs of everybody around except some kind of gang-resembling circle s.
• matt_s 8y ago
  An interesting bit from the article was that he talks about 'sunk cost' with the defining example of ordering a dessert when you're nearly full and feeling compelled to finish it. > There was an economist once early in my career who said to me, “You know, if you’re right, what am I supposed to do? What I know how to do is solve optimization problems.” A career economist not wanting to change their ways because they have spent a career doing things when presented with a possible outcome that maybe those things didn't matter as much. Also: > If you think of companies that have come and gone, like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, but they had an almost-monopoly in film, and didn’t really think this digital thing would go anywhere. Blockbuster Video, which came along and put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop video stores out of business, only to be put out of business by Netflix. These are human behaviors to recognize - sunk cost. It can sink a company. Something to be wary of as a startup grows past adolescence and into adulthood.
  • RickS 8y ago
    My understanding with Kodak is that they invented digital tech far earlier than expected (pre 80s) and hushed it to avoid cannibalizing their existing film business. I suspect Blockbuster behaved similarly. It's hard to kill the golden goose. Still examples of the sunk cost fallacy, for sure, but it feels like "lack of realization" is perhaps the wrong attribution.
    • matt_s 8y ago
      In a way, it is sunk cost all the way down. Those companies' entire existance - supply chain, manufacturing, down to identity of what they do was so etched into everything it was hard to change.
      • nvarsj 8y ago
        It happens all the time with large companies. Motorola is another, mostly forgotten example. They invented digital radios for cell phones, but they were so entrenched in analog radios at the time that they gave the technology away to a small company called Nokia. A few years later, they collaborated with Apple on an iTunes equipped cell phone, and shared their own internal designs of a full screen phone. I think this phenomenon is one of the few ways a big company can die.
• hotdog97 8y ago
  But people are sorta dumb, on average. It's all relative. Meeting and talking to an IQ 100 person (by definition the average IQ) - after just a couple of minutes you realize they are kinda dumb. Many of us have spent our entire working lives working alongside other people that have been selected for basically an above average IQ. What I'm trying to say is that many of us live in bubbles of high intelligence. We only breach this bubble when we interact with "normals".
• pascalxus 8y ago
  I understand that a nobel peace prize winner can NOT say that people are dumb. However, there are people on this planet that believe the earth is flat.
  • expertentipp 8y ago
    There are just periodical hysterias orginating from America (vaccinations, the earth is flat, religious sects, bucket challenges, etc) which like a shockwave created by the explosion of Tsar Bomba travel around the globe multiple times but finally, most extinguish.
  • frockington 8y ago
    Intelligence like everything else in nature has outliers on both sides. I have no idea why people seem to disagree with you, it's simple biology and statistics
  • crpatino 8y ago
    Well, there are people on this forum who do not seem to grasp the difference between lacking intelligence and holding a false belief, so there is that.
• hutzlibu 8y ago
  I admit I only skimmed the article, but I still throw in a potential controversal counterthought (even though I don't disagree with the article from what I read): People* are dumb. Why? They have been breed like that for many generations. Because all the classic Civilisations and Empires needed lots of dumb workers and peasants who were able to do their simple work, but not smart enough, to organize any opposition against the current empire. And this in many different forms, from total slavery to all kinds in between. Now with the Hypothesis, that smart people don't want to get exploited, they would rise up sometimes, where they grew in numbers - and got beaten down and crucified, hanged, quartered, etc. - so strong selection pressure for smart people not born into the elite and not wanting to become a monk. Now with all that being said, I believe it is probably more a cultural mindset of "stupidness" than "stupid" DNA in the people, because smart people also keep their heads low and pretend to be stupid, when they can't win a fight. But this got into a habit of not wanting to think. So the solution to all the complex problems in the world I don't think is a super government, thinking for all their dumb sheeps, but rather smaller systems, less complex - and letting people get smart again, by giving them the opportunity to make decisions again about their life. Not just a allmost meaningless vote which allmost counts nothing among the millions of other votes, but voting the decisions down at their very local lifes. When you have to think for yourself, you will start thinking again. And then you don't want those decisions taken away from you. Thats only comfortable when you forgot how to do it. * with "people" I mean the average person in the street, the one from the famous Churchill quote
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    >* with "people" I mean the average person in the street, the one from the famous Churchill quote Most people are dumb about most things, good at a small number of things, and excel in one to three things.
  • taeric 8y ago
    Oddly, I think if you were to take that in a slightly different direction, you'd get more traction. Specifically, take your * and have it say * by "people" I mean collections of people. Individuals often show remarkable intelligence. Even that, of course, ignores that there is some wisdom in crowds. I'd guess there is a sense of "inertia" in how people behave/think. With more people, more inertia. Slower changes and seemingly slower progress sometimes.
• jokoon 8y ago
  This scene of ex machina describes what human intelligence is really about: http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/the-true-power-of-data-mining-search-engine/view http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/the-t... "imperfect, impulsive, chaotic, fluid, patterned" This is where the politics of emotion and marketing are winning the most. Rational economics are only serving our moral standards, sense of merit and our fascination with order.
• kro39nxkdk 8y ago
  Read this book to understand the argument: Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of... https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470890444 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470890444 The first example given is a health one: models say taking this medicine fixes X. But patients fail to take it all the time. Humans are not to be treated as cold hard facts. Our reliance on stats, regardless of getting the equation “right”, is very similar to our history of “follow the scripture”. We’re chasing an outcome of following the numbers and ignoring the process we’re using to get there It’s a simple process that fails humanity over and over: conform to authorities narrative Folks like Demore might be following correct mathematical process, but they and their data have no real authority over others in a so-called free society
• qazqwert 8y ago
  wrong!. just look at this little thing... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNBG27S1kuMrx0oO19QUMPA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNBG27S1kuMrx0oO19QUMPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9XKUP6dw2E&list=PLe57autMFbo7-pyf7E-uz2JfVX5l2NaEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9XKUP6dw2E&list=PLe57autMFb... <-- watch the full playlist only ! and i mean only!!! if you feel ready to kill yourself after understanding how stupid people are... i mean man... the standards of the world are going down so badly.... shit education and people don't understand how (E!!!!)eyes are spelled/ basic multiplication... people are stupid and there's nothing u can say that can disproof that we need better education! not idiots who say the world is too hard... people need to understand that... i mean yeah not all people need to know everything about the world and to understand about every little country at the world but for example if we would look at this...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUsnMObp9j0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUsnMObp9j0 at the moment people start to talk like this we can just start to see this bullshit.... i mean ok.... but the fact is that some people need 3 minutes to solve problems like 3x3 or 9x9 or.... thats unbelievable... just fucking unbelievable... !!! just look at this beauty https://youtu.be/ldP7ydEmapE?t=33s https://youtu.be/ldP7ydEmapE?t=33s well i believe I've made my point but for those of you who still believe the title/the article... that our world is fine... please... just................ stop the bullshit... (p.s i believe at Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences but in this people there are non of them... no brain power... no ability to think/imagine/... and that is what wrong with the world... people learn from the media not from real education.... for people to grow smarter we need curiosity and good education...) but the fact is that if people keep believing they are smart (with 100 or 90 or 80! or less points of IQ) then our world is fucked.... (please remember that and work for better education and... please re comment this and at least do not upvote this shit! )
• nixpulvis 8y ago
  The world doesn't need to be as hard as it is. Or what I should really say is, we spend more time/energy dealing with things than we shouldn't really need to, taking away from the time/energy we should be spending on other things.
• invalidOrTaken 8y ago
  ...but what this works out to is that you should behave as if people are dumb. So.
• jjtheblunt 8y ago
  Some people are dumb. I'm sure of that. Myself included at times.
• carapace 8y ago
  I remember starting to study economics as a kid and thinking "this is garbage" for two main reasons, one of which is now addressed by behavioral economics, to wit: the models of human behavior they were using were ridiculous. The other reason is that economists occupy a critical nexus in the feedback loops in human affairs. The best operational economists accrue wealth and keep their science a secret as best they can, and as an obvious part of that exterior economics can be (and is) filled with fluff and nonsense. It is little better than numerology. It doesn't surprise me that Thaler "has been an irritant to mainstream economists." More like an embarrassment, pointing out their lack of grounding in reality.
• simonh 8y ago
  I think people are dumb, and I'm not being derogatory about 'the 'masses' or any such crap. I'm unbelievably dumb. It often takes me a ridiculously long time to come to a solution to a problem, where the answer seems like it should be obvious. Instead my slow, feeble mammal brain takes forever to grope blindly around the issue before getting any traction. Lets say there is a scale of sentience that goes from 1, which is the lowest level of sentience necessary to develop a technological civilization, up to who knows how high. Where are we on that scale? Well, given that we literally, in evolutionary terms, only just barely got our civilization off the ground we're pretty clearly very close to 1. I discussed this with my brother and he pointed out most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher. They're the geniuses that truly drive innovation forward. So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.
  • hohenheim 8y ago
    Its hard to argue with what you are saying. You defined our most intelligent types scaled as 1 and unbounded it for most intelligent. Then obviously majority falls under the line and are considered dumb. I don't know if there is any insight in that other than feeling disappointed at self. On the other hand the article is arguing the opposite. Trying to be empathic towards human nature and look for solutions with that in mind. I think that is refreshing and useful.
  • ci5er 8y ago
    Thank you for being you. It has been very lonely for me to propagate that very idea, esp. given how tied humans are to the idea that they are smart. On the spectrum humans use, I'm certainly on the high-end of it, but, gosh, we are such retards. We only think that we think.
  • Rainymood 8y ago
    To truly argue on this point you need to, I think or at least in my opinion, settle on a definition of "smart" and "dumb". I like to view our intellect as a tool for survival of our species. By that measure, we are doing fairly well. We used to get wiped out by minor stuff like not enough food, not enough protection from the elements and other animals, diseases, we have eradicated the majority of these things hindering our survival. I hypothesise that most of the people here (on average) on HN are highly educated. It's kind of fashionable and almost necessary social behavior to be humble in your own intellect. By all objective measures the people on HN are really fucking smart but you can't say that of course because that's "arrogant". Yes, I too think I'm stupid and suffer from impostor syndrome having two graduates degree in applied math. Anyway, humans, compared to other animals we compete with for survival, food, and territory, are doing really well. I don't see any cows on the moon yet.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• grosjona 8y ago
  >> THALER: So my toast began by saying that my fellow winners had discovered things like gravitational waves, and circadian rhythms. And I discovered the existence of humans in the economy. Funny quote. It's a testament to how complex things are and how far people go to simplify them.
• remusrm 8y ago
  yeah... sure... they are way dumber and just look at savants in academia that are so out of touch with reality! Heck, Idiocracy movie is becoming prophecy!!
• throwawayzx9 8y ago
  People are dumb AND the world is hard.
• anotheryou 8y ago
  Title gets discussed at ~50min of a 60min podcast...