Astral Codex Ten

Dan Ariely

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Dan Ariely

Article

Dan Ariely is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 30, 2021 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely”; “the Dan Arielys of the world”; “power posing, stereotype threat, Dan Ariely, maybe the whole Identifiable Victim industry”. It most often appears alongside Barack Obama, Kahneman, replication crisis.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: August 30, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
Jason Hreha’s article on The Death Of Behavioral Economics has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance.
Inline links: The Death Of Behavioral Economics
(source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: source, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
In one sense, this is good: buy one “rationality training”, and we’ll throw in a “personal growth” absolutely free! In another sense, it’s discouraging. Personal growth is known to be hard. If it’s a precondition to successful rationality training, sounds like rationality training will also be hard. Scout Mindset kind of endorses this conclusion. Dan Ariely or whoever promised you that if you read a few papers on cognitive bias, you’d become a better thinker. Scout Mindset also wants you to read those papers, but you might also have to become a good person.
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
I spotted a few things as I went through that I knew had failed to replicate since the book was written, and there is also a fair bit of leaning on the work of Dan Ariley, who turned out to be actively fraudulent. The rest of it, well, I don’t know. I haven’t gone and read all the papers describing the studies the book refers to in order to see if I think they’re of reasonable quality, or checked if they’ve replicated or if there’s been a meta-analysis that agrees or disagrees with them.
These might seem like damning criticisms but they’re really not. Nothing in this vein is free from the stain of the replication crisis. If you threw out every book that referenced even just the absolute bottom tier stuff like Dan Ariley and John Bargh, you wouldn’t have a discipline left. This whole discipline is crawling out of a huge hole of fraud, wishful thinking, and appalling lack of rigour. People like Haidt, even though I may be quite sceptical of his category formation, are broadly pulling it upward. It makes thinking about this area hard but it does not make it impossible or useless.
One counter-argument to this recommendation is perhaps that the best bits, like the elephant-and-rider idea, has seeped onwards into the broader culture where you can find it without the baggage of having to think about Dan Ariley, wrestle with a confusing and contradictory approach to meta-ethics, and work out how anyone could bundle Ron Paul style libertarianism and Ibram Kendi style social justice into one supposedly foundational pole of morality and call it a day.