Apple's new Mindfulness app lets you log in your “momentary emotion” and “daily mood”...

"... compiling a diary of feelings and their causes — perhaps family time makes you happy and time working in front of screens makes you sad — which could be reflected back as insights that might help make things better. [There] was a set of tools for improving users’ 'vision health,' with a focus on myopia.... Using data from device sensors, Apple will instruct users — especially but not exclusively young ones — to go outside, into the natural light, or to move their screens further from their faces....[while also selling you] the Vision Pro, a $3,500 computer that straps directly to your face...."

From "Apple Keeps Trying To Fix Its Users/The company’s guilty conscience is making it nudgy" (NY Magazine).

"How Change Happens, Sunstein tells us, 'reflects decades of thinking.' This is another way of saying that it repeats decades of writing."

"To call it his 'new book' you’d have to accept that there is something meaningfully distinguishing it, beyond the physical barrier of its cover and binding, from his previous books—an assumption that in Sunstein’s case is easily disproven. Like an unstuck Mallarmé, Sunstein does not produce books so much as The Book, a single volume of ideas that’s recycled, with only minor variations, from title to title. Broaching a new Sunstein these days, you already know what you’re going to get: a section on the joys and uses of cost-benefit analysis, some dashed-off thoughts about utilitarianism and negative freedoms, three or four chapters on nudges and their importance to the design of seatbelt policy, the primacy of Daniel Kahneman–style 'slow thinking' over intuition and moral heuristics, some tut-tutting about social media, a Learned Hand quote or two, and a few weak anecdotes about Sunstein’s time as President Obama’s regulator-in-chief, all delivered through a prose that combines the dreariest elements of Anglo-American analytical style with the proto-numerate giddiness of a libertarian undergrad who’s just made first contact with the production possibility frontier.... How Change Happens conforms so comically to type that it repurposes several passages of text from Sunstein’s previous books, even his most recent ones. Hence he tells us that people typically think that more words, on any given page, will end with -ing than have n as the second-to-last letter—an anecdote you would have already encountered had you made it as far as page 30 of The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He explains the Asian disease problem and provides a number of choice-framing analogies also found in The Cost-Benefit Revolution. He retells the David Foster Wallace water parable spotted on page eleven of On Freedom, published in February of this year...."

From "The Sameness of Cass Sunstein/His books keep pushing the same technocratic fixes. But today’s most pressing questions cannot be depoliticized" by Aaron Timms (The New Republic), which as you can tell from the subtitle, goes on to find more substantive problems than chatty repetition.

What does "Like an unstuck Mallarmé" mean? I had to look it up. Here (from "Blocked/Why do writers stop writing?" (The New Yorker, 2004)):

After the English Romantics, the next group of writers known for not writing were the French Symbolists. Mallarmé, “the Hamlet of writing,” as Roland Barthes called him, published some sixty poems in thirty-six years. Rimbaud, notoriously, gave up poetry at the age of nineteen. In the next generation, Paul Valéry wrote some poetry and prose in his early twenties and then took twenty years off, to study his mental processes. Under prodding from friends, he finally returned to publishing verse and in six years produced the three thin volumes that secured his fame. Then he gave up again. These fastidious Frenchmen, when they described the difficulties of writing, did not talk, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, about a metaphysical problem, or even a psychological problem. To them, the problem was with language: how to get past its vague, cliché-crammed character and arrive at the actual nature of experience. They needed a scalpel, they felt, and they were given a mallet.

So you get what Timms is saying about Sunstein.

"Just How Creepy Are Uber’s Driver-Nudges?"

Asks New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, who's reading a NYT article that nudges you to think that Uber's nudges are creepy.

The company is trying to solve basic problems baked into its business model: From Uber’s point of view, it’s great to have tons of drivers on the road, because that means customers don’t have to wait as long to get picked up. But from drivers’ points of view, having fewer fellow drivers on the road is best, because it means less time idling and earning no money (since drivers get paid only per ride, not on an hourly basis).

So Uber has introduced all sorts of nudge-y tricks to try to keep drivers driving. Some involve gamification — drivers can earn certain (meaningless) badges if they meet certain performance benchmarks — while others involve subtler forms of engineering, like building menus and interfaces in a way where certain options are easier to click. Drivers, Scheiber’s reporting reveals, often feel they’re being nudged into working more than they want to for less than they feel they should be earning.

Singal wonders whether what Uber is doing is anything different from the usual maximizing of profit within the current "American framework in which workers are increasingly alone, batted around by epochal forces, simply trying to get by." So I guess the question is comparative creepiness. Or... if something is common enough, is it just not creepy anymore?

I see I have a tag for creepiness. What is creepiness and why should we care about creepiness as opposed to simply whether something is good or bad? I found 2 useful things:

1. "The Age of Creepiness" (The New Yorker, July 9, 2015):

Half a century ago, there were squares and libertines, stalwarts and histrionics, private lives and public personalities. Today, in our self-scrutinizing, liberated time, these categories have got scrambled, and distinguishing between a charmingly revealing Instagram post and a bomb of oversharing requires daunting feats of judgment. Looming behind many missteps is the threat of creepiness: a fear that, out of all the free paths open to the modern social actor, you have picked the one that is invasive, obviously needy, and perverse.

2. "On the Science of Creepiness/A look at what’s really going on when we get the creeps" (The Smithsonian, October 29, 2015):

Being creeped out is different from fear or revulsion, [says a psychology professor]; in both of those emotional states, the person experiencing them usually feels no confusion about how to respond. But when you’re creeped out, your brain and your body are telling you that something is not quite right and you’d better pay attention because it might hurt you....

[T]here’s an evolutionary advantage to feeling creeped out, one that’s in line with the evolutionary psychology theory of “agency detection”. The idea is that humans are inclined to construe willful agency behind circumstances, seek out patterns in events and visual stimuli, a phenomenon called pareidolia. This is why we see faces in toast, hear words in static or believe that things “happen for a reason.”...

"Democrats Begin Nudging Sanders Off the Stage" — sounds like they want to see the old man to tumble into the orchestra pit.

On the front page of the NYT right now:



Linking to "Hillary Clinton Is In, Bernie Sanders May Exit, and Democrats Seek Unity."

The nudge and the prick.

Reading that last post out loud with Meade, we were talking about how the Democratic Party is trying to create anxiety by letting you know that the Party knows how much money they've gotten out of you this year.

It reminded me of that mailer I received a couple years ago from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, showing my name and my home address and whether I'd voted in recent elections in a list with the same information about my close neighbors. That was really egregious guilt tripping, because neighbors were getting information about each other, so the organization was openly leveraging everyone's need to maintain esteem in the community.

But the new email from the Democratic Party relied on a similar psychological manipulation: My reputation is at stake. People whom I want to think well of me know that I'm not quite good enough, and they are showing me what I can do to fix that. I'd better vote this time so I don't look bad on the next mailer OR I can hit the $3/$10/$50 donate button.

Meade said this what they call "nudge." You know about the nudge. Cass Sunstein wrote a book on the subject "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

I said there needed to be a different word, because "nudge" seems to be a positive poke in the right direction, not the creation of anxiety around the thing that they don't want you to do.

That word is: PRICK.

"Prick" is the ideal word — quite aside from any indelicate intention to refer to male genitalia — because it means (OED): "To cause mental pain or discomfort to; to sting (esp. the conscience) with sorrow or remorse; to grieve, pain, torment" and "To poke at something as if to pierce it; to make a thrust or stab at." That is, "prick" is precisely the negative version of "nudge."

By the way, the "coarse slang" use of "prick" to mean the penis goes back to c1555:

c1555   Manifest Detection Diceplay sig. Biiiv,   To turne his pricke vpward, and cast a weauers knot on both his thumbs behind him....

The other "coarse slang" usage, which I particularly like in connection with my recommendation of a nudge/prick distinction is "A stupid, contemptible, or annoying person (esp. a man or boy)." That goes back to 1598:

1598   J. Florio Worlde of Wordes at Pinchino,   A pillicock, a primcock, a prick, a prettie lad, a gull, a noddie.

More recently:

1934   H. Miller Tropic of Cancer 110   Jesus, what I'd like is to find some rich cunt—like that cute little prick, Carl.

Miller doesn't mean he wants to find a "rich cunt" who resembles "that cute little prick, Carl." He means he wants to find "rich cunt" like the "rich cunt" found by "that cute little prick, Carl." Is Miller a sloppy writer or did he find that ambiguity amusing?

In any case, the word of the day is "prick." Don't let those manipulators of the masses say "nudge" when the word should be "prick." Observe the nudge/prick distinction.

ADDED: I just realized: If you like this blog post, you might want to consider doing your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Cass Sunstein thinks the FDA's new requirement that food sellers post calorie counts "could turn out to be a game-changer."

So the argument that businesses should go through all this expense and trouble is that it just might work.

The motivating idea is that consumers should be free to make their own choices -- but that those choices should be informed ones. Most restaurants have little incentive to disclose calorie information on their own. The new FDA rule is meant to force such disclosure, and then to rely on the operation of the free market.

The FDA hopes that once consumers see calorie counts, they will make healthier choices, and there is evidence to support the agency’s optimism.... The evidence is far from unequivocal, however. Some studies find little or no effect....

But... [s]ometimes disclosure requirements affect providers more than consumers, prodding them to change their offerings. As a result of the FDA’s rule, many restaurants, cafeterias, convenience stores, movie theaters, vending machines and so on will offer healthier foods -- at least as long as their customers want to buy them.

I'm amazed that this kind of guesswork and casual hopefulness is all that supports such an expensive and troublesome new requirement.

"Hamilton wrote in Federalist 12 that a tax on whiskey 'should tend to diminish the consumption of it'..."

"... and that 'such an effect would be equally favorable to the agriculture, to the economy, to the morals, and to the health of the society. There is, perhaps, nothing so much a subject of national extravagance as these spirits.'"

From Clay Risen's "How America Learned to Love Whiskey, Attempts to control the fermentation and sale of alcohol are older than the republic itself."

"Control" is harsh. Isn't the right word "nudge"?

"Madison committee to consider paying employees to bike to work."

Ha. That's very funny to me because just this morning, as Meade was driving me to work, we were observing the people on bikes and I said, "It's almost all young white males. All these bike lanes and other amenities, paid for with our tax money? It's almost all for white males. Oh, how it would pain Madison liberals to admit it!"

Nudging in the U.K.: labeling stairwells in public buildings with calorie counts.

"Using a dedicated website and app, people will be able to scan 'smart signs' on stairs and track their number of calories burnt over time."

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said: “Anything that gets people more active and helps tackle obesity is a good thing in my book. This initiative is a great mix of old fashioned common sense and smart technology to track and incentivise.”

Anything?

StepJockey got a £50 million government grant for that website and app. Its founder Helen Nuki says:

"The world is a gym and we aim to label it as such. It has the added benefit of cutting carbon emissions by reducing the number of lift journeys."

Ah, these Brits, always leading the way. Shakespeare wrote:

All the world's a gym,
And all the men and women merely gymrats:
They have their sidewalks and their stairwells;
And one man in his time burns many calories...

"Men Should Pay for Maternity Care Because BABIES."

Headline at DoubleX about babies, written in babytalk. Here's the argument:

The long-term prosperity of the U.S. depends on healthy citizens, men supply the sperm, it’s just a genetic lottery that made you a man and not a woman, and think of your mother who had to bear you!

But even if you don’t care at all about the women bearing the children, you should care about live human babies that are going to be born regardless of whether their mothers get adequate prenatal care. And really, really bad things happen to babies whose mothers don’t get adequate prenatal care. 

At the point when you purchase insurance, the individual customer would like only to insure for things that are possible. Everyone at the point of purchase knows whether they are male and thus naturally and absolutely immune to the risk of pregnancy. So why can't they get a price based on what they need to insure? The argument at the link is coherent only if you concede that we are no longer talking about insurance. We're talking about taxation to pay for a welfare benefit. 

If we weren't so deeply embroiled in Obamacare, it might be interesting to talk about whether the government should subsidize all maternity care. To do so would nudge women away from abortion. Perhaps the government could use the opportunity to gather information about the quality of the parenting that is likely to ensue and to take stronger actions to protect the "long-term prosperity of the U.S."

Remember, women's bodies are the portals through which all future generations of humanity must enter the scene. Old-school feminism took umbrage at thinking about women as containers of babies, but today's feminists are more like old-fashioned wives, and the message is: Pay the bills!

"Dr. Ed Friedlander displays his tattoo with a medical directive to not use CPR."

Caption on a photo on an Atlantic article subtitled "An ICU physician on taking time to discuss with patients how they see their final days."

It is scary to ‘nudge’ a patient toward an end-of-life decision. But maybe that’s what it means to be a doctor — knowing our patients and helping lead them toward the decisions that are most consistent with their wishes. And nothing is scarier than the status quo.

Also new at the Atlantic website today: "Death Is Having a Moment/Fueled by social networking, the growing 'death movement' is a reaction against the sanitization of death that has persisted in American culture since the 1800s."

I've got a feeling death will be having a "moment" until the last of us Baby Boomers has departed.

"Why Men Need Women" — the headline to an article about "Why Women Are Good At Getting Men To Give Away Their Stuff."

Instapundit finds a choice example of "the Althouse rule." Here's the underlying article, "Why Men Need Women," which reports a study that finds that "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

Instapundit notes that this is the kind of finding that could rankle feminists, who should resist the idea that society's purpose for women is to tame men and structure their otherwise destructive energy for the good of the group.

Fortunately, though, this political incorrectness is offset, as the piece by Adam Grant adheres slavishly to the Althouse Rule on writing about gender, which is that you can report anything so long as you do so in a way that portrays women as superior.

Here's my post from 2005 stating the rule and demonstrating its application in the context of a study about the response to cartoons, which was reported under the headline, "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." "That's not funny" is a punchline for jokes about humorless women, but somehow the reporter of the study transformed the old deficiency into an asset.

"Government isn't an all-purpose social-utility machine just waiting to help us make better decisions..."

"... if only we'd be willing to give up our stubborn adherence to the principle of individual autonomy."

Even if we were to set aside all our cherished notions about how liberty is intrinsically good, it would still make sense to be skeptical of whether regulators know or care about the full consequences of their regulations.

And:

If helping people involves insulating them from the natural consequences of their actions, this could "nudge" them to be more irrational. For instance, everyone knows that students sometimes act irrationally: they procrastinate, they write substandard papers when they're capable of doing better, they turn work in late, etc. Given these realities, it's an open question how teachers should nudge students to do less of this kind of thing. The teacher who's willing to give any grade from an A+ to an F- might be more effective than the teacher who gives everyone a B+ or A-.

"Nudge" is in quotes because the author of the linked post — disclosure:  he's my son — is talking about an article — which we discussed recently — written by Cass Sunstein, who's made "nudge" his buzzword.

I wonder if the tendency to lean libertarian or fascist has more to do with how much you love autonomy or more to do with how much you trust government.

(Sorry about writing "libertarian or fascist." I know it's inflammatory. I was going to put "right or left," but it just didn't make sense. Some righties are out to control us, and some lefties — especially on some issues — love autonomy.)

Cass Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism."

That's a book by Sarah Conly, published by Cambridge University Press. 206 pages, $95. $95! Fortunately, we cannot be coerced to buy that. I will exercise my autonomy and refrain from buying it. I'll just read Sunstein, for free, here.

[A] significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty....

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Sunstein refers to social science research that shows people actually aren't very good at making decisions for themselves. We have "present bias" (and don't pay enough attention to the future), we're bad at assessing probability, and we're "unrealistically optimistic."

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion....

To Mill’s claim that individuals are uniquely well situated to know what is best for them, Conly objects that Mill failed to make a critical distinction between means and ends. True, people may know what their ends are, but sometimes they go wrong when they choose how to get them....

If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so....

A natural objection is that autonomy is an end in itself and not merely a means. On this view, people should be entitled to choose as they like, even if they end up choosing poorly. In a free society, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes, and to the extent possible learn from them, rather than facing correction and punishment from bureaucratic meddlers. Conly responds that when government makes (some) decisions for us, we gain not only in personal welfare but also in autonomy, if only because our time is freed up to deal with what most concerns us....

 As for Sunstein himself, he prefers a softer form of government manipulation, described in the article and in his book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

"Objects characteristic of business environments, such as briefcases and boardroom tables, make people more competitive..."

"... less cooperative, and less generous. Smells matter too: mere exposure to the scent of an all-purpose cleaner makes people keep their environment cleaner while they eat. In both cases, people were not consciously aware of the effect of the cue on their behavior. Or consider this one: people’s judgments about strangers are affected by whether they are drinking iced coffee or hot coffee! Those given iced coffee are more likely to see other people as more selfish, less sociable, and, well, colder than those who are given hot coffee. This, too, happens quite unconsciously."

From Cass Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (p. 71). From section of the chapter titled "Following the Herd," which deals with "priming," one of the influences on human behavior that government can figure out how to use.

***

I was searching through my ebook of "Nudge" today after writing that post about offering drug-addicted women $300 to get themselves sterilized. Offering money is the crudest way to incentivize behavior you don't want to compel (or can't — ethically or legally — compel), and I was interested in whether Sunstein and Thaler talked about sterilization. They don't, but they do talk about deterring pregnancy:

Teenage girls who see that other teenagers are having children are more likely to become pregnant themselves. Obesity is contagious. If your best friends get fat, your risk of gaining weight goes up.... (Page 55.)

Teenage pregnancy is a serious problem for many girls, and those who have one child, at (say) eighteen, often become pregnant again within a year or two. Several cities, including Greensboro, North Carolina, have experimented with a “dollar a day” program, by which teenage girls with a baby receive a dollar for each day in which they are not pregnant. Thus far the results have been extremely promising. A dollar a day is a trivial cost to the city, even for a year or two, so the plan’s total cost is extremely low, but the small recurring payment is salient enough to encourage teenage mothers to take steps to avoid getting pregnant again. And because taxpayers end up paying a significant amount for many children born to teenagers, the costs appear to be far less than the benefits. Many people are touting “dollar a day” as a model program for helping reduce teenage pregnancies. (Surely there are more such programs to be invented. Consider that a nudge to think of one.) (Page 234.)

Consider that a nudge to think of one? Are you nudged to rethink free birth control?

ADDED: The notion that hot coffee makes people less selfish and more "sociable" reminds me of the Coffee Party. Remember that? The liberal answer to the Tea Party.

"Sunstein has nothing to do with the 'czars' or the problems with the ‘czars.'"

"The ironic thing is that anybody else who might be appointed to this job would be less qualified, and more liberal. I disagree with what Sunstein writes in 'Nudge.' But what he advocates is not as bad as the views likely to be held by other people who could run [the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs]."

"If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he?"

Asks John Cassidy (as he reviews "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein):

One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics....

The central tenet of the Chicago School is that markets, once established and left alone, will resolve most of society's economic problems, including, presumably, the mortgage crisis. Keynesians—old-school Keynesians, anyway—take the view that markets, financial markets especially, often fail to work as advertised, and that this failure can be self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. In some ways, the behavioralists stand with the Keynes-ians. Markets sometimes go badly awry, they agree, especially when people have to make complicated choices, such as what type of mortgage to take out. But whereas the Keynesians argue that vigorous regulation and the prohibition of certain activities such as excessive borrowing are often necessary, behavioralists tend to be more hopeful about redeeming free enterprise. With a gentle nudge, they argue, even some very poorly performing markets—and the people who inhabit them—can be made to work pretty well.