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People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

freakonomics.com

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Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#181

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Zimahl wrote: post #154
dqpb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to talk and what to say, but not how to think.

That's the anti-college talking point that republicans like to preach to the uneducated masses. It's absolutely designed to devalue what is actually being taught in higher education, allow for the easy dismissal of soft sciences. And once you can dismiss soft sciences, you can certainly dismiss the hard sciences with guilt by association. I earned my CS degree from a liberal arts college and took my share of liberal…

You know, there's a certain classist dismissal here of people who just plain did not attend university, let alone take "liberal arts classes" (someone please tell me what the normative value of my Chinese mythology course was!). How about we stop assuming the working class can't think for itself, eh?

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#182

Post by eli_gottlieb »

enraged_camel wrote: post #109
gdubs wrote: post #95

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."

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 even…

Eh, that kinda boils down the entire social, political, and technological arc of Asimov's Galactic Empire into the caricature we later got in the form of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#183

Post by taeric »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176

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 ag…

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.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#184

Post by jimbofisher1 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176

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 ag…

I think its extremely unlikely that there is any actual evolutionary process selecting for less intelligent people, in fact the opposite is probably more likely to be true. I'm not sure you were really sugesting that though.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#185

Post by afpx »

throwaway37585 wrote: post #167
ucaetano wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This isn't strictly true, and I'd love to see you provide extensive data on such a exceptional claim. There is a lot of evidence showing that harsher punitive measures often have little to no impact on crime and wrongdoing.

I don’t think the claim is exceptional, but I’d love to see more studies on this. Check out the Centipede Game ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game ): “Parco, Rapoport and Stein (2002) illustrated that the level of financial incentives can have a profound effect on the outcome in a three-player game: the larger the incentives are for deviation, the greater propensity for learning behavior in a repeated si…

What would the game’s results be if the financial incentives were unknown and/or highly variable? That’s more like real life.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#186

Post by gilbetron »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176

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 ag…

That seems like an incredibly uneducated view of what the world was like previously.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#187

Post by CuriouslyC »

ucaetano wrote: post #156
rvern wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will sev…

> People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This isn't strictly true, and I'd love to see you provide extensive data on such a exceptional claim. There is a lot of evidence showing that harsher punitive measures often have little to no impact on crime and wrongdoing.

If your choice is between death and jail, or if your life is not significantly better than jail, the duration of incarceration isn't going to matter to you at all.

I'd be willing to bet that harsher punitive measures (and more aggressive enforcement) would have a big impact on white collar crime rates.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#188

Post by jcutrell »

mattnewport wrote: post #87
jcutrell wrote: post #67

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 res…

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 the…

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.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#189

Post by bluGill »

sandworm101 wrote: post #65
mhb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it takes collective action to decide what to ban.

>> 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 an…

On your example: are you sure there is nothing to debate? No possible harm? No possible unintended consequence?

One thing I've observed over and over is that there are unintended consequences to everything. It often takes years to figure them out.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#190

Post by copperx »

skadamat wrote: post #80

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=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 h…

> Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work

I'm curious. I wasn't aware of this. What are these strong opinions about?

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