Invisible Manipulators of the Mind
The article is long but fairly interesting, repeating much of what Kahneman said in <i>Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow</i>. But I have a few comments.<p>What is called &#x27;nudging&#x27; in the political and policy making sphere and portrayed positively is really the same as what advertisers and salesmen have been doing for many decades and even centuries, and Kahneman has pointed that out, too, of course.<p>However, &quot;Libertarian Paternalism&quot; is a misnomer for several reasons. First, &quot;libertarianism&quot; is a highly misleading, US-centric label for certain brands of liberalism. It&#x27;s not a coherent political position and instead used by very different people ranging from the right-wing authoritarian to the right-wing liberal spectrum to endorse a diffuse and internally inconsistent mix of cherry-picked elements of classical liberalism, general anti-federal government sentiments and individual anarchism. Second, there is not much liberal about nudging, since the the whole idea of nudging is to influence people to do the &#x27;right thing&#x27; by exploiting flaws and heuristics in their decision making abilities, thereby limiting their actual choices. Real freedom of choice requires the people to be well-informed and educated well enough that the slow system can kick in. It&#x27;s an old trick to ascribe some &#x27;de jure&#x27; choice that in reality does not amount to any real choices for various social and external reasons, and then claim that people are free to choose whatever they want. This has already been criticized in depth by Amartya Sen.<p>In the end, whether ads, propaganda, and nudging are acceptable or not hinges pretty much on a moral evaluation of the goals of the nudger and the circumstances and level of influence a group gains over another. There is nothing wrong with making people slow down their car by subtle hints on the driveway, so they don&#x27;t accidentally run over children in an urban housing zone. In other areas such as voting I cannot find anything positive about nudging, since the fate of one&#x27;s country should always be based on decisions that are rational and as well-informed as possible, i.e., made primarily on the basis of the slow system.<p>One (but not the only) criterion for distinguishing good and nefarious uses of advertising&#x2F;nudging is whether the person is lied to or not. Lying to people in order to achieve a desirable outcome is generally unacceptable, according to what many if not most people think, and I agree with them. There may be exceptions under unusual circumstances, but generally I expect my policy makers to take me as an adult individual and only put up a sign &quot;Beware shark attacks&quot; whenever there is an actual danger of shark attacks.