Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
For me, the best book critiquing the “nudge” agenda is Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage . As he writes from within the field, Sugden engages with the most technical arguments while avoiding a romanticised view of human decision making. In his entertaining The Manipulation of Choice: Ethics and Libertarian Paternalism , Mark White does not quite rise to that level. His three-pronged…
Below is a collection of book reviews that I have posted - click the links to go to the full review. Adam Alter’s Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching : a well-written and entertaining book about a subject I don’t know much about (addiction), with one glaring slip. Dan Ariely’s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves :…
I recently completed BlueDot Impact’s AGI Strategy Course . (I recommend it.) Through the weekly discussions, I went down the rabbit hole of gradual disempowerment . I find many AI threats compelling, but gradual disempowerment is the risk where my background perhaps offers the most insight. I find an interesting tension in this topic. I have written in the past about how more decisions should be…
Experimental economists don’t deceive their subjects. It’s not legislated, but break the norm and don’t expect to be published. Here’s Andreas Ortmann (2019) : I open with a statement of fact: deception in the form of acts of commission, while still widespread in (social) psychology and business sciences such as marketing, is factually banned in laboratory experimental economics. This ban is not…
As Gary Marcus so often appears in debates about the future of artificial intelligence, I decided to grab his 2008 book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind from my overgrown reading pile. I’m glad I did, though not because it taught me much about the human mind. It helped me understand Marcus’s critique of generative AI. Marcus’s argument is that the human mind is a ‘kluge’, a…
From a fantastic post by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez on LessWrong about the use of AI by Go players: The appealing, exciting archetype of a cheater is one that uses covert, elaborate methods to get outside information and fraudulently obtain prize money or prestigious titles. Instead, we learned from the many examples of cheating and player confessions that idle curiosity and laziness were the dominant…
The books I enjoyed the most in 2025 were: Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass : I occasionally consume young adult books that my kids are ploughing through. This might be my favourite. I didn’t enjoy the next two in the series as much. Nate Silver, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything : I loved the first half of this book, when the focus was on poker and gambling. The second half on tech and…
This is a story about a study that refuses to die, despite overwhelming evidence it should. From a new article in HBR on using behavioural science when rolling out AI tools: Consider building an AI transcription tool. It would be reasonable for designers to assume that the most seamless interface is always best. But behavioral research shows that intentionally adding a little friction—e.g.,…
From Donald Redelmeier and Eldar Shafir’s (1995) classic paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association: Intervention: The basic version of each scenario presented a choice between two options. The expanded version presented three options: the original two plus a third. … Results: In one scenario involving a patient with osteoarthritis, family physicians were less likely to…
In the early days of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka The Nudge Unit), their successes quickly became part of the behavioural economics canon. They were the only behavioural team publishing results publicly, so those became the stories everyone told. These stories included how adding social norms to tax letters increased on-time submission , giving sweets and a personalised message from the CEO…
The debate about whether large language models are transformative or overhyped occasionally produces real-world data. These inevitably arrive with eye-catching headlines (e.g. MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing ) built on shaky methodology (based on 52 structured interviews at conferences, analysis of 300+ public AI initiatives and surveys with 153 leaders). There’s…
Want to demonstrate human “irrationality”? Ask half of your audience the following question: Was Elvis older or younger than age 45 when he died? Ask the other half: Was Elvis older or younger than age 75 when he died? Then ask both groups: How old was Elvis when he died? Those asked if Elvis was older or younger than age 45 tend to estimate a lower age of death than those asked about age 75. This…
This week, language, language models and replication: How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher : So much great material in here, even if you’re just interested in getting across LLM foundations. From that list, ARENA’s AI Safety course is fantastic - again, even if you are just interested in LLM foundations. Do Machine Learning Models Memorize or Generalize? : A great explainer on…
Experimental psychology research before the mid-2010s was a mess. The field was littered with papers with weak to non-existent theoretical foundations. Experimental data was unavailable. (The statement “data is available on request” is somewhat of a joke .) The experiments involved small samples and barely significant p-values. File drawers were overflowing with the carcasses of experiments that…
This article was intended for a different forum. When that didn’t work out, I decided to park it here. – Professor of Sociology William H. Sewell was deeply interested in social mobility. Do career aspirations affect career achievement? Do individual and social traits underlie those aspirations? Despite some preliminary research in the 1950s, Sewell lacked the data to answer these questions. In…
This reading list is a balance to the one-dimensional view in many popular books, TED talks, conferences, academic press releases and consultancy sales pitches. For those who feel they have a good understanding of the literature after reading Thinking Fast and Slow , Predictably Irrational and Nudge , this is for you. [In the time since I drafted the first version of this list in 2017, it’s fair…
The books I enjoyed the most in 2024, although all were published in different years: Ashlee Vance, When the Heavens Went on Sale : For all the grumbling about how progress in software isn’t matched in the physical world, Vance tells some amazing stories. The tale about how Planet Labs got going using smartphone technology to make shoebox size satellites was fantastic. Julia Galef, The Scout…
In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes an experiment by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua: In a different paper, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua shows why relying too much on AI can backfire. He found that recruiters who used high-quality AI became lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment. They missed out on some brilliant applicants and made worse decisions than…
The below are my speaking notes for a presentation in the Innovative methodologies in behavioural science session at BI Connect 2024 , hosted by the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The notes reflect many of the themes discussed in more detail in a previous post on megastudies . When BETA posts the video of the session,…
If you ever read a claim of an AI outperforming a human, dig into the performance data to check out the human benchmark. The mediocrity of the human is often more salient than the competence of the AI. The AI has an easy job. Here’s an example from a paper by Ayers and friends (2023) . They sampled 195 question and response exchanges on Reddit’s r/AskDocs and entered those same questions into…