Dan Ariely presents his latest work at BX2019

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He does research in behavioral economics on the irrational ways people behave, described in plain language.
His immersive introduction to irrationality took place as he overcame injuries sustained in an explosion. During a range of treatments in the burn department he faced a variety of irrational behaviors that were immensely painful and persistent. He began researching ways to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients.
Ariely became engrossed with the idea that we repeatedly and predictably make the wrong decisions in many aspects of our lives and that research could help change some of these patterns.

[@CaffeinatedGamer]

I ❤ Dan Ariely.

[@user-me3nm1pp2d]

My hero!!

[@wololo817]

Very insightful.

[@dougwedel9484]

Not every prompt to change comes because we want the best for others. When there are 10 companies making the same kind of product all of them ask us to buy from them and not from the others. We hear sometimes decades later that what was touted as something good for us was just a marketing effort to sell us stuff. Examples are people urging us to drink a lot of water daily, that dehydration can harm us. But the people who first asked us to drink 10 glasses of water a day were selling performance drinks. It was a jewelry company who said we should spend a month salary on an engagement ring. We need to be aware of the truth and be aware of these politicking and asks for their own gain.

[@kiranmiryala1725]

I'm fascinated by Dan's principles of reinforcement in the text message based RCTs'. I'm curios if these results proved to be consistently higher within the same subject group or were they consistent among different test subjects? It would be an important distinction to be clarified. A reasonable argument would be that these results would fade with multiple attempts with the same subjects, if that is the case, how would one improve/tweak the model to accommodate for the new threshold of principles?

[@interestingyoutubechannel1]

One of the greatest thinkers (and do-ers!) of our time, globally. With positivity-driven creatives like him & Daniel Kahneman, who boldly want to deal with the big challenges of humanity, its no wonder Israel is driving global innovation in the sciences. Israel gifted the world with life-saving medical tech and water technologies, but evidently... ..also now wrestling with the greatest challenge of all, for all of us - facing, head-on, the shortcomings of the human mind, and structuring potentially pragmatic solutions. I think everyone should warmly answer his invite to collectively work together on this, as one human race.

[@odins_claw]

He's a liar and a fraud who falsifies data in the most ridiculous way. You could say he's a stupid fraud

[@ufopiloot]

As a Belgian, I'm interested in knowing more about that story about us and NL.

[@JoshuaTree97]

You are bringing something to humanity. I hope you understand the meaning of your effort and work. I would work for you free. easy.

[@Achrononmaster]

@37:00 you've got it completely backwards Dan. Tax receipts do not fund the currency issuer, it's the other way around. Tax liabilities (not receipts) create demand for the otherwise worthless currency. What the private sector supply is labour and goods, they get the state currency in return so they can _then_ pay their tax liabilities, the residual government spending not taxed back is the net surplus of the private sector (accumulated annually it is all our net savings). Welfare recipients are funding the private sector, not the other way around. When welfare payments go down, all else equal the demand economy shrinks (GDP is lower) dollar-for-dollar. The "tax payer funded" myth is probably the *_greatest sustained lie in history,_* but it does apply for gold standard or fixed exchange rates, or if you use a foreign currency (like a euro-zone member, since they are not currency sovereigns) but not for nations who issue their own fiat currency.

[@richardakadickieofvauxhall8720]

To the point in a clear understanding and, at the very same time, understandable manner - just as expected. However there is one aspect I did not catch mentioning so I wonder if it was /looked into/discussed: that so-called "the other way round" method when, in order to understand complexity and/or outlier/unexpected/irrational phenomena existing assumptions of the method used fir researching are tweaked by changing their statement to the opposite meaning but with the validity of the method maintained. Prof Ariely states that people tend to behave irrationally and make bad decision - as research data substantiates this. So state instead that people always make rational decisions and try and find valid explanation for observing irrational or contra-productive behaviour. I learnt this from the work of Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist-became-epidemiologist who studied behaviour in relation to STIs in Asia. Her finding - that ever since changed my clinical work as well us all relationships in all domains for better: People always behave rationally and make rational decisions. If they observed to behaving irrationally that is either because the observer does not see or understand the whole context or because the Truth is yet to be unearthed in its entirety. (apologies for paraphrasing. That, to me explains why gut feeling is getting more and more recognised as reliable to the purpose of human existence. On the other hand, for the first time in millíenia, the finger points at a (hijacked) culture of Western societies that are rooted in the Christian dogma of original sin, i.e. every one of us is a sinner even before birth, which shifts the responsibility for behaviour onto the individual that, by now known, not only limiting and unfair but source of societal anomy, mental health problems to the extent of public health crises, particularly with personality disorders, addiction, dissociation as stress management, as well as societal anomy (see E Durkheim's work for reference). So the question is whether Prof Ariely and his colleagues looked at things from this vantage point?

[@Achrononmaster]

That was a good comment. Human decision making makes total sense when you understand what drives it (emotions mainly, but sometimes forethought).

[@ajmarr5671]

Why behavioral economics needs a Copernicus! A major criticism of behavioral economics is that it is merely a compendium of the many ways economic behavior veers from the ‘rational actor’ model of individual incentive that is foundational to classical economics. Ultimately, the idiosyncrasies of behavior must be derived from first principles, namely an understanding from neuroscience as to how incentive motivation works, which is very different from the rational actor model. Without this we are forced to rely on myriad situational observations of small or middle scope, with behavior acting in eccentric patterns like the planets in the night sky. In his critique of behavioral economics, the economist Jason Collins used just this analogy to describe how a lack of a deep and foundational understanding of how the world works can make the solar system seem positively deviant and impossibly complex. “So, I want to take you to a Wikipedia page that I first saw when someone tweeted that they had found “the best page on the internet”. The “List of cognitive biases” was up to 165 entries on the day I took this snapshot, and it contains most of your behavioral science favorites … the availability heuristic, confirmation bias, the decoy effect - a favorite of marketers, the endowment effect and so on …. But this page, to me, points to what I see as a fundamental problem with behavioral economics. “Let me draw an analogy with the history of astronomy. In 1500, the dominant model of the universe involved the sun, planets and stars orbiting around the earth. Since that wasn’t what was actually happening, there was a huge list of deviations from this model. We have the Venus effect, where Venus appears in the evening and morning and never crosses the night sky. We have the Jupiter bias, where it moves across the night sky, but then suddenly starts going the other way. Putting all the biases in the orbits of the planets and sun together, we end up with a picture of the orbits that looks something like this picture - epicycles on epicycles. But instead of this model of biases, deviations and epicycles, what about an alternative model? The earth and the planets orbit the sun. Copernicus, of course, it’s not quite as simple as this picture - the orbits of the planets around the sun are elliptical, not circular. But, essentially, by adopting this new model of how the solar system worked, a large collection of “biases” was able to become a coherent theory. Behavioral economics has some similarities to the state of astronomy in 1500 - it is still at the collection of deviation stage. There aren’t 165 human biases. There are 165 deviations from the wrong model. So what is this unifying theory? I suggest the first place to look is evolutionary biology. Human minds are the product of evolution, shaped by millions of years of natural selection.” Perspective on incentive from evolutionary biology- Jason Collins evonomics.com/please-not-another-bias-the-problem-with-behavioral-economics/ A lay account of incentive from affective neuroscience (also informed by evolutionary biology) www.scribd.com/document/495438436/A-Mouse-s-Tale-a-practical-explanation-and-handbook-of-motivation-from-the-perspective-of-a-humble-creature An academic account of incentive from affective neuroscience- Berridge lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/Berridge2001Rewardlearningchapter.pdf Berridge Lab, University of Michigan sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/ And wiki list of biases en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[@hansvetter8653]

Do not forget ... ! .... real inventions and useful innovations do not flow from academia ... ;-)

[@jason280881]

So let me get this straight: a researcher says that they have collected personal data of a whole nation in public and the audience laughs and the talk carries on... I must be missing something here....

[@richardakadickieofvauxhall8720]

A book perhaps, dear Jason, you might have missed to get acquainted with titled: 1984. It's been a while that then fiction become reality for most around the world. Also, do not forget the context of time, place, projected image vs lived experiences if values and culture in which the project takes place. 😉

[@jason280881]

@@richardakadickieofvauxhall8720 i had the luck to read the big brother dystopian book long time ago. But you are making some interesting points. I will keep that in mind 😊

[@aloevera7422]

Read Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshone Zuboff. 1984 is a child’s book in comparison.

[@aloevera7422]

Good luck

[@interestingyoutubechannel1]

Do you have any social media accounts or google account? If yes, then you should be able to laugh too. We're all being data-hacked at much more intimate depths than what he's described here, and I mean globally. Irony is a beautiful thing, he's using the insane tech around us, for doing something good for a change.

[@aloevera7422]

They laughed when I sat down with surveillance capitalists but when I started to play!

[@gokhanj.yenigun7933]

Please welcome me in joining...

[@Achrononmaster]

@36:00 economists who want more tax compliance? That's their problem. If you have unemployed people your tax compliance is too high, drop the tax rate. Tax liabilities (not receipts) generate unemployment _by design_ so if you are not at full employment you need to either issue more currency or lower the tax liability, or a bit of both. Also, unnecessary tax compliance/evasion costs are up to 25% of GDP each year, a huge waste of human effort, put the tax avoidance lawyers out of a job and retrain them to help cure cancer instead.

[@Achrononmaster]

False framing really. Information is the only thing that works. But half the information is generated inside people's skulls. This is why psychologists have something to say about behaviourism. Behaviourism was completely discredited decades ago. Behavioural Econs seem to be perilously close to reinventing that failed paradigm. Every human decision makes perfect sense if you peer inside the person's mind and find their drives and emotional resonances, it's just we can't peer so well.

[@mohitb5230]

slightly less engaging talk by someone of his calibre

[@JDothan]

Oh my god, it’s almost as if men and women have different interests and preferences and the “gender gap” is simply people exercising free will.

[@richardakadickieofvauxhall8720]

Distribution/Association by Gender (let it be gap, identity or bias) is impossible to get right to socially construct, a kind of non-entity if managed/viewed/judged externally but very serious with real consequences in multiple domains of human life when experienced, i.e. materialises internally. That's my opinion on it based on nothing better than my biased life experiences - particularly as a clinician of a scarcer kind who works across 11 specialities and as an employee whose career progression got halted and plans reconfigured a few times when related policies did not get it right attempting fulfilment of their purpose. Just an opinion so it may not be true. Yet not automatically false. Therefore shared in here to illustrate. 🙂