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Human behavior in a post-rational world
For some years now I've been involved with a small community group. It's a shoe-string organization that depends entirely on volunteers. These curious creatures have a predictable life-cycle. It begins when someone shyly asking if the group needs help, then hanging about trying to be useful and not ...
If there's one thing that unites the good guys in movies and TV shows, it's a hatred of "procedure"—those legal niceties that get the bad guys out of jail and prevent the hero from finding the bomb in time. Who cares about regulations? Results are what matters. And it's not, of course, a sentiment ...
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At the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes made a bold but logical prediction (pdf): In the long run, humanity was solving its economic problems, so that by 2030, in "progressive countries," a 15-hour work week would be the norm. Now, 17 years short of 2030, the world seems to ...
Imagine you have a friend who, like many high-achieving people, has a goal. In the service of that goal, your friend eats very little and ends up looking like skin on bone. It is through fasting and reflection that we know God; or, if you prefer, it is through this hunger strike that we can express ...
The term "Big Data" naturally conjures up images of Big Users, like the government or Google or Costco. It's easy to see why big enterprises crunch data to learn, for example, which groceries people want on the first day of a heat wave and which they want later on, or how warmed-up Scots buy ...
Post-rationalist government—where laws and regulations conform to human psychology rather than to the notion that each individual is a logical calculator—is a hot idea these days. Next to old-school policies that provide incentives (pay your taxes on time or you'll be fined!) there are now an ...
Is denial of climate change a fringe belief, like thinking the moon landing was fake? Or is it just one current of thought in our society, which deserves respectful engagement, like, oh, atheism, or being pro-life? The question is important. If a belief is beyond the pale of respectable opinion ...
When I was a teen-age consumer of cheap paperbacks about worlds more interesting than this one, I noticed a clear and sharp split between readers who loved SF (spaceships, time travel, robots) and those who loved fantasy (lanteen-sailed boats, mystic quests, elves). The other night, watching the ...
How, our grandchildren will ask, did we come to marriage equality in the United States? And we'll answer, like Hemingway's Mike Campbell: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." We can grasp Gradually, the speed we Americans are taught to expect (a government of checks and balances and all that ...
As recently as a decade ago, a common middle-class American interpretation of a father in a heterosexual couple was "Mom's assistant," as Louis C.K. called it. Parenting was a job defined by the mother, performed more or less correctly by the father, according to her specifications. Today, many of ...
Are smokers, non-exercisers, non-savers and other such undisciplined people acting irrationally? The conventional wisdom of our decade says yes, of course, they are. That's why we need policies that will help people overcome the mind's biases toward error. Not so fast, say a number of dissenters ...
One of the biggest misconceptions about post-rational behavioral research is that its effects on society are small. From the news you get the impression "behavioral economics" is all about changing the 401(k) plan from opt-in to opt-out, or informing people, via their bills, how their electricity ...
A study of U.S. Air Force drone operators has found they experience post-traumatic stress and other mental-health troubles at the same rate as pilots who are actually flying aircraft in war zones. That may sound odd if you accept the stereotype of high-tech warfighting as a bloodless videogame ...
"Pay attention to that alley over there. A gorilla in a clown suit is going to come out of it in a second." If I said that to you, and the ape subsequently appeared, you would (rightly) conclude that I'd helped you see the beast by focussing your attention on the right place at the right time ...
Social science can be controversial, but it has established some facts beyond a reasonable doubt, which are now part of "what everybody knows." Like the 20th century's "great moderation" in economics, which replaced capitalism's booms and busts with a gentler, more predictable landscape. Or the way ...