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Evidence for behavioural interventions looks increasingly shaky
- raxxorraxor 4y agoFollowing the same erroneous line of thought the next strategies might now situate themselves between nudging and strong enforcement. Something to really look forward to. Asking people or setting an example are of course ideas that have to be discarded, applied statistical analysis is far more convenient and you have to write some kind of paper. They don't strictly have to but are certainly decisively nudged to do that. In the interest of their career of course, you got to get that numbers up. At least nudging worked for pissoirs though. I like the subtlety of the critic saving the theory. It would be good to do something against publication bias as suggested in the article.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoIt seems weird to me that no one mentions the importance of timing and source of "nudging". I hoped govs and agencies would learn not to go overboard with nudging when trust levels in their policies was low to begin with.
- taylorius 4y agoHonest debate and persuasion is so 20th Century.
- ariendj 4y agoI kind of miss honesty, though.
- winReInstall 4y agoHonest debate was the ultimate adventure. Sad its gone, replaced by yelling matches in feeling hive-mind choirs. Guess this how medieval times felt, with oppossing faiths.
- nervousvarun 4y ago"Guess this how medieval times felt, with oppossing faiths." And we all know that led to...crusades? Welp.
- klibertp 4y agoAt least for now we still have the yelling matches where people of different faiths can yell at each other without fear of burning at a stake. Getting "cancelled" as a result of yelling the unpopular thing is still less painful than torture and execution on the town's plaza. "For now" and "still" are the words which I had to insert in the above, and their forced presence seriously scares me.
- winslett 4y agoRead the article. Retitled article should read “Not all nudges work”. The interesting bit from the source article is that changes to the mean do not always reflect the value of the nudge. So, when judging a nudge, data should be spun various ways to determine impact on different segments of the population.
- ur-whale 4y ago> “Not all nudges work”. The real question being, what's the actual hit rate. If below 50%, they'd be better off flipping a coin.
- martingoodson 4y agoThis is a poor headline (from The Economist) that does not reflect the referenced work. The correct interpretation is that nudges need to be tested in the field to find out if they work. This is common knowledge in behavioural science. Experts are not good at predicting which nudges are going to work in practice[1]. Trials are always needed. This is no different to the requirement for drug trials. Drugs are not released just on the say so of pharmacologists, empirical evidence is needed. And yet nobody says pharmacology is looking ‘shaky’. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115126119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115126119
- vintermann 4y agoI wonder if the problem with "nudge" is that for publicity reasons, people only call it a nudge if it sounds like a tiny thing that doesn't sound like it would work. If it's an obvious intervention, such as a default option in a pension form, or higher prices on tobacco, or condom vending machines in hotel restrooms, they don't call it a nudge anymore. And I also have the feeling some of these may be babies that the Economist's editors would like to throw out with the bathwater.
- t_mann 4y agoDefault options in forms are the standard example of a nudge, a tax however is definitely not a nudge, the article actually explicitly says so.
- vintermann 4y agoIn that big meta study that questioned the efficiency of nudges, it was said in the discussion on HN that they excluded default options from the definition of nudges. Either way, the line seems arbitrary to me, and it's part of why I think they're moving the goalposts.
- t_mann 4y agoI don't know what people on HN said, but it's the first example of nudges of you look here (and pretty much anywhere else): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Types_of_nudges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Types_of_nudges
- not_knuth 4y agohttp://archive.today/cuHfh http://archive.today/cuHfh
- Vetch 4y agoWhat is a nudge? Do dark patterns, tactics employed by casinos or loot box games that depend on whales and children of wealthy parents count?
- prohobo 4y agoFundamentally yes, except that nudge theory is about manipulating collective action (or inaction) in populations. Promoters of this theory also envision themselves as trying to help, not fleece people of their money.
- asimpletune 4y agoI don't know a lot about this, but would an example be like when Draghi was at the ECB and he responded with "Whatever it takes" when asked about the S. Europe debt crises? Or how exactly does nudging look like in practice?
- t_mann 4y agoNo, Draghi's statement was signalling, not nudging. He was willing to throw billions at the problem (and eventually did), his communication was meant to reduce the need for such an intervention.
- simonh 4y agoThere's a difference between nudge as in the technical meaning here from behavioural psychology, and what we would commonly call a nudge in everyday english. An economist or politician might describe Draghi's statement as trying to nudge the behaviour of the banks, sure, but that doesn't conform to what behavioural psychologists mean by a nudge in the technical sense. Which is fine of course, pretty much every specialist discipline has special meanings for some everyday words.
- prohobo 4y agoNudging would look like this (excuse the politics, it's just the most immediate source of examples): people who are up to date on their vaccinations may get perks and be allowed to enter certain venues just by showing their card, while everyone else gets no perks and has to pay for testing to enter venues or are barred entirely. Another example: instead of regulating testing for travel, allow third party companies to manage official testing certificates and set their own prices. This happened in the UK, where Covid tests were free from the government unless you wanted to travel - at which point you had to pay a private clinic upwards of £50 (sometimes more like £150) to get a 24 hour pass. Nudging looks very much like incentives and restrictions in a mobile game.
- prohobo 4y agoThe chair of behavioral insights advisory in the WHO is one of the co-authors of Nudge Theory. So it's probably safe to say that government health programs - in any country that is supported by the WHO - also implement Nudge to some extent.
- jansan 4y agoFreddie Sayers made a really, really good comment at the end of his recent UnHerd video about this: "It's not a conspiracy. It's no a communist plot. But what it is, is taking a particular worldview, a view about how society should operate, and removing it from the normal democratic conversation, where people can battle it out, and instead hardwiring it into poerful supranational organizations." Here is the part of the video that I am referring to: https://youtu.be/Lm-S5zlnHIk?t=528 https://youtu.be/Lm-S5zlnHIk?t=528
- brandmeyer 4y ago> It's not a conspiracy ... poerful [sic] supranational organizations. Come on. You can't claim that something isn't a conspiracy and then invoke world-government conspiracies in the same paragraph and expect to be taken seriously.
- nradov 4y agoIt's not a conspiracy. These powerful supranational organizations are doing it out in the open and have publicly stated their intentions. Many of us disagree with their goals, and consider their methods unethical.
- meltyness 4y agoThis seems like a healthier language for these types of incentives. Without discussion, engineering a system where the elevator is on the top floor always is torture, sadism even. But what of scholarships? Is money truly the common language spoken at the tender ages these are issued? How do you convince students, once beyond the drudgery of state-mandated public school, that the sudden tradition, idolatry, and care of academia is even a change? How do you put that fruit at eye-level without using cash to whip scholars into meeting minimums, as adjudicated by paper examination?
- next_xibalba 4y agoCan an expert in the field dissuade me of my pessimism about psychology as a science? From the outside looking in, it appears to be a field populated by grifters and incompetents who churn out junk knowledge. Power Posing (Amy Cuddy) Priming (Bargh, Kahneman, and others) Outright fraudsters (Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters) Precognition (Daryl Bem) Disgust & Homophobia (Yoel Inbar) Anchoring (Kahneman and Jacowitz) Or is it all of human sciences (the scandal of Alzheimer's research comes to mind)?
- robocat 4y agoThe “human sciences” are just freaking hard - for all the reasons you are pessimistic. The “hard sciences” are much easier - less of that soft stuff to work around. Agree that the humanities are often pants-on-head whacko. Disclaimer: hard science engineer type.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago> about psychology as a science? You can easily have the opposite point of view: The so called hard sciences deal with human concepts and not reality. An alien society would not have the same physic or math. Many concepts of our physic are a bit circular or need ad hoc parameters. Kepler make a good model from data by Tycho Brahe. Newton made an even larger model from Kepler's laws, yet it's only a model. Einstein... you get it. Without Tycho Brahe all the rest would be simply speculations. Without Michael Faraday, would we have Maxwell, and Heaviside? The Romans did not liked math, and the Bantu migration did not even used writing scripts as we know them. Gengis Khan was able to conquer and create the greatest empire of the world and Mongols of that time used little scripts. The so called human sciences on contrary deal with reality, it's incredibly complex. There is no real way for us to understand the complexity of reality.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> An alien society would not have the same physic or math They would have the same math. They might have a different number system.
- tpoacher 4y agoThe problem I see increasingly is the conflation of "X as an intervention doesnt work" with "There is no evidence for X", which is two entirely different things. To give a concrete example: "Stop-smoking interventions commonly fail" equated to "no evidence that stopping smoking improves health".
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- more_corn 4y agoI love when Idiots like google misunderstand nudge to mean “shove”. It doesn’t work and makes me hate you. Good job. Worst of both worlds.