People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

For the exact same reason that most software companies don't have a Computer Science Ph.D. on staff. Many companies don't need a high-caliber research department.

People who learn and understand how to apply ideas and theories from behavioral economics in biz and econ courses are well-represented in sales and marketing roles. Just like people who learn and understand how to apply ideas and theories from Computer Science in CS courses are well-represented in engineering roles.

> why none of the behaviourial Economists have ever tried starting up?

I'm sure many have lucrative consulting portfolios, but generally speaking: because they already have a pretty cushy and very well-paying job doing what they love.

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.

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.

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.

Not just "sometimes", it takes the threat of violent people in uniforms ALL of the time when dealing with people bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.

The issue is that the violent people in uniforms, (and even the people controlling them for that matter), can ALSO be bent on benefiting themselves at the expense of others.

It's not only grassroots organizations that can be corrupt, the government itself is actually even more likely to be corrupt. So you almost have to solve corruption before you try to solve the other structural issues. And corruption is just a very hard problem to solve.