What besides work in behavioral economics has focused on the humanist side of the sciences as a means of helping humanity beyond the basic black and white?

How to create a "religion of science" which helps to displace the psychological problems, theological hate, etc?

More data = More accurate results

Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

Link to Garden of Forking Paths

Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.

It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.

What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

Teodorescu, K., Plonsky, O., Ayal, S., & Barkan, R. (2021). Enforcement policies: Frequency of inspection is more important than the severity of punishment. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pbvzr

behavioral economics? This was probably only a nascent field at the time this was written.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

We must go beyond behavior nudges to make significant gains in demand side solutions. It requires an integrated strategy of inner transformation based on the latest research in trans-disciplinary fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and behavioral economics among others.

Leder, J., Lauer, T., Schütz, A., & Gürerk, Ö. (2021). Background Uncertainty Can Increase Risk Aversion in Decision Making. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6s4vf

I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017

Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?

Opinion: Ontario’s COVID-19 failure stems from politicians’ inability to understand how people behave. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 April 2021, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-ontarios-covid-19-failure-stems-from-politicians-inability-to/?utm_medium=Referrer:+Social+Network+/+Media&utm_campaign=Shared+Web+Article+Links

Milkman, K. L., Beshears, J., Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., & Madrian, B. C. (2011). Using implementation intentions prompts to enhance influenza vaccination rates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(26), 10415–10420. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1103170108

I wonder a bit about applying behavioral economics or areas like System 1/System 2 of D. Kahneman and A. Tversky to social media as well. Some (a majority?) use Twitter as an immediate knee-jerk reaction to content they're reading and interacting with in a very System 1 sense while others use longer form writing and analysis seen in the blogosphere to create System 2 sort of social thinking.

This naturally needs to be cross referenced in peoples' time and abilities to consume these things and the reactions and dopamine responses they provoke. Most people are apt to read the shorter form writing because it's easier and takes less time and effort compared with longer form writing which requires far more cognitive load and time expenditure.

Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among rational decision-makers.[1] It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic, systems science and computer science. Originally, it addressed zero-sum games, in which each participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of the other participants. Today, game theory applies to a wide range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers.

--Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

Humanities & Social Change (2020, April 30). Cultures of expertise and politics of behavioral science: A conversation with Erik Angner. https://hscif.org/cultures-of-expertise-and-politics-of-behavioral-science-a-conversation-with-erik-angner/

Fatfouta, R., & Oganian, Y. (2020). Bargaining under social distancing requirements: Effects of face masks on socio-economic decision-making in the COVID-19 pandemic [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cn7by

Behavioural Economics on a Post-It. (2020, June 16). Impact of Social Sciences. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/06/16/behavioural-economics-on-a-post-it/

Loewenstein, G., & Chater, N. (2017). Putting nudges in perspective. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2016.7

Freyens, B., & Hawkins, J. (n.d.). Contact tracing apps: A behavioural economist’s guide to improving uptake. The Conversation. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from http://theconversation.com/contact-tracing-apps-a-behavioural-economists-guide-to-improving-uptake-137157

Johnson, S. G. B., Zhang, J., & Keil, F. (2020, April 30). Win–Win Denial: The Psychological Underpinnings of Zero-Sum Thinking. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/efs5y

Johnson, S. G. B., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (2020, April 30). Conviction Narrative Theory: A Theory of Choice Under Radical Uncertainty. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/urc96

Ennis, E. G. (2020, April 16). A Novel Solution to Academic Publishing. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gqxmu

Sodha, S. (2020, April 26). Nudge theory is a poor substitute for hard science in matters of life or death | Sonia Sodha. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/26/nudge-theory-is-a-poor-substitute-for-science-in-matters-of-life-or-death-coronavirus

¡Bienvenido! Se lo invita a unirse a una reunión: Applying Behavioral Economics to Work and Life. Luego de la inscripción, recibirá un e-mail de confirmación para unirse a la reunión. (n.d.). Zoom Video. Retrieved April 23, 2020, from https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodu6opj4sG9wTXoXvEN_-OVis_vJ6SZi1

Open research working paper version: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/427678/1/LosingFace_workingversion_nomarpar.pdf