Nudge and behavioural science should be disclosed wherever it is used. I shudder every time someone mentions "choice architecture". If people are being psychologically manipulated into a decision regarding their health or governance, then the people have moral a right to know when they are being manipulated and we need a legal right to protect us in the future.
The problem, borrowing a well-known turn of phrase, is that it’s nudgers all the way down.
That explains the censorship: the antidote to the nudging is the ability to hear differing perspectives: The human mind works best when comparing things.
Seeking to reinstall my land line instead of put 5G in me pocket....remember when a phone cost $40 and lasted 40 years? Anyway, no nudges for me....and I wont miss the damn autocorrect either....!
Wow you know that's a damn good (and unthought before by me) idea! I can live without 24/7 news access (along with tracking and other "features" of ubiquitous smart phones) as long as I have internet access at home.
Does it, though? In fact, the insights of the behavioral economists that "discovered" nudges (they really didn't, marketers discovered nudges almost as soon as marketing became a profession. Behavioral economists just identified the effects rigorously in experimentation and incorporated the insights in the rational choice models) discovered that humans are good at comparing a small set of different options, but if the options become too numerous humans ability to make decisions, let alone good decisions, drops precipitously.
There were two big experiments here: one involved jams at the grocery store and the other involved retirement saving programs offered by employers. In both cases, when the number of options increased beyond a few, the number of actual decisions humans made dropped and the satisfaction with decisions actually made dropped. Humans are good at deciding between a few options (depending on the complexity of the issue 2 to 5 options), beyond that humans suck at comparing things. When it comes to phenomena amendable to scientific examination, the number of different hypotheses is practically infinite. Hence, more rigorous methods are needed to decide between the hypotheses.
When the options are too numerous, humans tend to arbitrarily restrict the choice set. There is no reason to believe that they will restrict the choice set to a subset that contains the best choices.
"the insights of the behavioral economists that "discovered" nudges (they really didn't, marketers discovered nudges almost as soon as marketing became a profession."
When I was on a walk, imagining how I'd write this article, that popped into my head, and I should have written it into the article, but forgot (so much going on). This is often the case with modern pop science and sometimes even Nobel level science. An idea intuitively employed (black swans, antifragility, system 1 vs. 2 thinking, etc.) by many people, but framed with some math or science added and with good linguistic presentation.
But to be fair, some of those authors *do* give credit to the shoulders of humanity they stand on.
I think some of this, intentionally or not, is the bureaucracy of science as technocracy. And like the chaos of nudges, it may be reaching a critical mass.
No, I haven't. Godwin's law states that as an online discussion gets longer the probability of a Nazis reference approaches 1. Thus, every instance of an online discussion that eventually has a Nazis reference is evidence in favor of Godwin's law. If we take Godwin's law as a hypothesis explaining something, then yes, this is an instance of Godwin's law striking. If we take Godwin's law as simply a name given to a regularity we observe, then we have another instance of that regularity, or analogically, Godwin's law striking.
I realize I nitpick arguments in this forum, but even by my standards of nitpicking this is a bit excessive.
As imperfect as the human mind may be, there’s little logic behind using that as an excuse to have some other human mind limit our access to information, because surely that other human mind is subject to the same limitations, irrespective of what superstitious rituals may be wrapped around their filtering process.
People are always going to be at risk of believing something that is false.
However, we do it every day; everyone does it. If you go to the doctor, and you listen to their opinion and do not do the extensive lit review that they have done concerning your disease, you are letting an "expert" limit the amount of information you actually contend with. I agree that the doctor should not be allowed to limit your access to information; yet, the doctor's expertise does limit the information and choice set you contend with. This happens whenever you interact with an expert as an expert.
However, there is nothing in the open letter concerning the nudge behavior that says the government limited access to information; most of the accusations amount to the government emphasized certain data over others and exaggerated certain costs and benefits and used emotional appeals when presenting anything. We even have knowledge that the nudge unit is using the covert psych strategies to affect behavior. Nothing says the government limited access to information (if we are going to hold the government to account for something, we should be sure they actually did it).
It’s pretty clear that the government instructed the social media to do it. Oh, there was no memo, but neither did Henry II issue a memo about Thomas Becket. It was simply enough to publicly exclaim “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest”. The similar instructions from the White House were obvious.
And now, it’s considered “terrorism” to express a view contrary to that of the regime.
So, you might call that suppression of information.
First, I find it rich that you are making a point by using a story about Thomas Becket that was made up in the 18th century, 600 years after Becket was assassinated. That, the 5 eye witness reports that all roughly agree with each other, tell a story that looks a bit more like someone resisting arrest. https://blog.britishmuseum.org/thomas-becket-the-murder-that-shook-the-middle-ages/
Second, given that you have offered the false story as factual. Henry II and the knights involved might have a case of slander against you, if they were alive today.
Third, given that Facebook claims that in April through June of 2020 they had already taken down 7 million posts "spreading false information about covid and put warning notes on 98 million more," I am wondering what White House you are talking about. Trump was in the White House in April through June of 2020. So, are you accusing Trump's administration of this suppression of information? Or, am I correct in inferring that you were pointing to the Biden administration? This is of course impossible; there was no Biden White House in April through June of 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/11/facebook-covid-misinformation-takedowns/
Fourth, it is quite true that politicians across the spectrum have been calling for Facebook to do one thing or another with regard to censorship or not censoring or whatever. However, there is no law on the books at the federal level which gives the federal government any power over Facebook on this topic. Thus, at best what you are claiming is that certain politicians peer-pressured Facebook to act. It does not stop there, though. It is also true that legions of people that are nominally Facebook's customers have been calling for the social media site and other social media sites to police false statements more effectively. You also have other customers of Facebook calling for the social media site to stop censoring conservative voices. Short story, Facebook is receiving "peer-pressure" from it's customers! And, like most good companies in a free market have attempted to respond to their customers. To call this suppression is to make a mockery of the word suppression.
I take it that you have never tried the internet in China. Neither the the US government nor any private organization has the power in the US to scrub the internet of things they deem undesirable. The Great Chinese Fire Wall is suppression of information. That you actually have to do a legitimate search on a general search engine or a literature review of an academic journal database, like PubMed, instead of getting your information on Facebook IS NOT SUPRESSION BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.
Fifth, can you point to a law that defines opinions that are contrary to the opinions of "the regime" as terrorism? Because, I seem to remember, and still get emails from the Trump political action committee that defines anyone that has an opinion different from Trump un-American, a traitor, a socialist, and a threat to America. So, unless you can point to a law, I am going to call that "terrorism" BS as the status quo of US political discourse.
Feb 10, 2022·edited Feb 10, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Yes but there comes a point when you are so well nudged, you do not see other conflicting points and actively disparage those who do. That's the goal of every professional nudger.
When is that point? If someone is convinced by the arguments presented in favor of one side, have they been nudged so much that they actively disparage conflicting opinions or have they made a rational decision based on the evidence presented? If someone makes an objection to your position, is a legitimate rebuttal "you have just been nudged too much"? How would you present evidence to support that rebuttal? Is it possible that one person's "nudged too much" is another person's "rational decision based on the evidence available to them, which they believe is the extent of the evidence"?
That point is when nudging becomes programming and the individual's ability to hear and consider and respond to new information shuts down. Critical thinking turns off because they know everything, or think they do. For example, a doctor (an epidemiologist) once said to me, "If it were important I would already know it." This guy could not learn, adapt, change, or evolve.
That point occurs once belief takes over and there is a structural change in the brain. It is quite common among scientists, as well as Trumpsters and Liberals.
It's my understanding that epidemiologists are not actually scientists, they just say they are.
Instead, they're professional nudgers with projections generally off by a magnitude. Which is okay because they're not data scientists - their job is to gin up fear and manipulate compliance with various tools of propaganda. They will, for example, change the definition of a gene manipulation to "vaccine" to trick people into believing an experimental and untested gene manipulation is safe, as most vaccines actually are. Social engineering is a well-established branch of epidemiology.
They are True Believers because of their self-righteous belief that their ends justify their means. This makes them the the butt-end of jokes by real scientists.
Here is the Yale study design for the social engineering methodology for epidemiologists:
Agree although I'd love it if they would first obey the LAWS (Nurenberg for informed consent for starters) maybe in future if we ever get our specific forms of government back I'd also be very interested in your suggestion
Maybe Tommy doesn't see the flag as an "overt display of jingoism", but rather as a symbol of the values he holds. "Values first" and the flag as a symbol of the values. Maybe that is also why the U.S. flag is often used around the world as a symbol of freedom from every sort of tyranny. A symbol not so much of nationalism, but of the potential of free individuals.
Granted, our government has not lived up to those values, but I think that to a lot of people, and not just Americans, the flag represents those ideals.
Symbols mean different things to different people. I'm with the people who use the flag to represent the ideals of liberty, broadly. And as I said, I like Tommy a lot. I saw him interview David Wiseman, also, and really liked his ability to zoom in to details with a subject, then zoom out to the big picture. Critical.
Feb 9, 2022·edited Feb 9, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Cass Sunstein was in the Obama Admin, who took a lot of heat for a recommendation he made for empowering secret government influencers to patrol social media and try to direct the conversation in a way the government wanted. It was a purely authoritarian impulse, manipulating people in secret, which was a warning to anyone paying attention, of the authoritarianism in the heart of the Left, which unfortunately not a lot of people noticed.
They talk about the nudge on public radio in such an innocuous way. In practice around Covid their nudge took on a kind of desperation mixed with unimpeachable arrogance, wielding their nudge like trebuchet, lobbing volleys of shame and separation, demoliting social cohesion.
The Right did much the same with false equivalence and over-the-top "Lock her up!" The Left now seems more self-righteous as a reaction and the ends for both media created sides justifies the means. The guard rails are off and we've descended into religious fanaticism where it's kill or be killed. I blame the media for ginning up fake existential fear. It's not the People, but their self-selected media feed.
Feb 10, 2022·edited Feb 10, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Are we not continually nudged, starting with our parents who were themselves nudged to get a job, pay taxes, and obey? Our friends nudge with peer pressure. The media nudges with continual programming. The police nudge with night sticks and fines. In school we're nudged to get that gold star. Religion nudges you into their ideology of belief. Continually we are shaped and slapped around to produce the right answer for whatever the authority demands.
If you question authority you're nudging them and they'll schedule you for directed, intensive, and insistent nudging. The initial soft nudging by cultural engineers is a suggestion that can escalate into a demand for compliance with the threat of prison.
As a social control mechanism, technology applies subtle invisible nudges to population masses, while monitoring and measuring the effect on individual units. As necessary, more targeted shocks can be deployed.
The result is Utopia where everyone thinks the same because dissent is crushed. Happily, it's all for our own good.
Fab link, adore CHD and the work they do for an informed public. They pick up a key point most Americans would be shocked to learn. The NDAA 2012 authorized propaganda use against our own citizens, something expressly prohibited before that.
"A National Defense Authorization Act amendment in 2012 that legalized the use of propaganda on the American public makes it easier for governments to create self-serving narratives.
And thanks to a multi-billion dollar budget from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we are under the influence of the best messages money can buy — whether or not those messages are true."
Great post and nice to see the fig leaf used to put this giant hole in the propaganda ban, thanks. Voice of America propaganda aimed at Cuba could be heard by Americans in Florida which broke the no propaganda rule. To fix that and be in compliance all propaganda aimed at Americans was opened up.
Gotta love Congress who make no laws without loopholes to back door the activity theoretically banned. See insider trading for a good feel for how "laws" protect the criminal class.
The nudgers are being nudged over the cliff. Facistbook has all kinds of excuses why its share price dropped like a rock. Same with Twaddle.
But we all know a big reason they have: they nudged themselves out of being seen as the source for “the other side of the story”.
The very good thing about the last two years is the huge reduction in childish credulity among a sizable segment of the population.
I woke up to the media propaganda game in the 1970’s. I won’t say I haven’t been fooled in the intervening decades — wisdom is, after all, cumulative. But a healthy dose of intelligent skepticism has served me well.
It’s my hope that lesson has a bit broader appreciation as a consequence of two years of blatant bullshit.
I wish your description of fb stock price plunge was correct. But alas, it is almost totally due to Apple's new privacy settings. I acknowledge that FB has lost users (me among them), but I bet those users were not invested in the FB world, so no great loss.
I was a heavy user, and early during the pandemic ran a discussion forum for evidence regarding treatment therapies (before serving 8 or 10 suspensions).
Am I the only one wondering about the graph that reads the peak of the bell curve for women’s height to be around 5’4” (sounds good) and men’s height to be around 6’8”? Meanwhile I appreciate the mental exercise here, I queued the book Nudge on my reading list
Interesting. If anything I have learned from the past 3 years is that those in leadership 1) will use any means necessary to convince people 2) they don't care about you. My desire has been to figure out their game, so I can become as good as them and win. I want the side of good to win.
Thank you for explaining in detail how the peer pressure (nudge) we all felt works. Have linked to your substack in my substack re an aussie perspective. To quote a good Doc and outlier of "concensus" medicine shoved on us by the Nudge Nerds. "READ THIS" (if you want to stand a chance of understanding what is happening and who -or rather WHAT - is controlling your narrative) https://feesgarden.substack.com/p/the-nudge-sequel-first-nudge-nudge?r=sldla&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for teaching me about the nudge with some good graphs. I also enjoyed seeing how systems can go bimodal. Here is a thought for you, which in working on the implications.
Which I think epigenetics is key. Mass vaccination as a policy will always fail to achieve better public health because adverse reactions are non-normal processes.
I also think these mRNA jabs are non-ergodic nightmares which we are watching their awful effects continue to unfold. I think the migration of the nano particles into the organs is starting to occur whose effect is pronounced in boosters as described here is one of the non-normal effects that would either be dismissed as coincidence if observed in early testing.
I watch UK Column news to bypass the obscene propaganda broadcast by the BBC et al. So they enlightened me about the Mindspace document and the part of the government that you refer to. Apparently using psychological ploys on an unsuspecting population to cause untold mental, societal, physical and economic damage is something the UK is willing to share worldwide.
Here's a fun read - Page 1 section 2 - Persuasion.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/887467/25-options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22032020.pdf
Nudge and behavioural science should be disclosed wherever it is used. I shudder every time someone mentions "choice architecture". If people are being psychologically manipulated into a decision regarding their health or governance, then the people have moral a right to know when they are being manipulated and we need a legal right to protect us in the future.
The problem, borrowing a well-known turn of phrase, is that it’s nudgers all the way down.
That explains the censorship: the antidote to the nudging is the ability to hear differing perspectives: The human mind works best when comparing things.
Seeking to reinstall my land line instead of put 5G in me pocket....remember when a phone cost $40 and lasted 40 years? Anyway, no nudges for me....and I wont miss the damn autocorrect either....!
Wow you know that's a damn good (and unthought before by me) idea! I can live without 24/7 news access (along with tracking and other "features" of ubiquitous smart phones) as long as I have internet access at home.
I going to give that idea some thought
Does it, though? In fact, the insights of the behavioral economists that "discovered" nudges (they really didn't, marketers discovered nudges almost as soon as marketing became a profession. Behavioral economists just identified the effects rigorously in experimentation and incorporated the insights in the rational choice models) discovered that humans are good at comparing a small set of different options, but if the options become too numerous humans ability to make decisions, let alone good decisions, drops precipitously.
There were two big experiments here: one involved jams at the grocery store and the other involved retirement saving programs offered by employers. In both cases, when the number of options increased beyond a few, the number of actual decisions humans made dropped and the satisfaction with decisions actually made dropped. Humans are good at deciding between a few options (depending on the complexity of the issue 2 to 5 options), beyond that humans suck at comparing things. When it comes to phenomena amendable to scientific examination, the number of different hypotheses is practically infinite. Hence, more rigorous methods are needed to decide between the hypotheses.
When the options are too numerous, humans tend to arbitrarily restrict the choice set. There is no reason to believe that they will restrict the choice set to a subset that contains the best choices.
"the insights of the behavioral economists that "discovered" nudges (they really didn't, marketers discovered nudges almost as soon as marketing became a profession."
When I was on a walk, imagining how I'd write this article, that popped into my head, and I should have written it into the article, but forgot (so much going on). This is often the case with modern pop science and sometimes even Nobel level science. An idea intuitively employed (black swans, antifragility, system 1 vs. 2 thinking, etc.) by many people, but framed with some math or science added and with good linguistic presentation.
But to be fair, some of those authors *do* give credit to the shoulders of humanity they stand on.
I think some of this, intentionally or not, is the bureaucracy of science as technocracy. And like the chaos of nudges, it may be reaching a critical mass.
Two original nudgers, both from around the 1930's, were Bernays and Goebbels.
Godwin's law strikes again.
You have misinterpreted Godwin's law.
No, I haven't. Godwin's law states that as an online discussion gets longer the probability of a Nazis reference approaches 1. Thus, every instance of an online discussion that eventually has a Nazis reference is evidence in favor of Godwin's law. If we take Godwin's law as a hypothesis explaining something, then yes, this is an instance of Godwin's law striking. If we take Godwin's law as simply a name given to a regularity we observe, then we have another instance of that regularity, or analogically, Godwin's law striking.
I realize I nitpick arguments in this forum, but even by my standards of nitpicking this is a bit excessive.
As imperfect as the human mind may be, there’s little logic behind using that as an excuse to have some other human mind limit our access to information, because surely that other human mind is subject to the same limitations, irrespective of what superstitious rituals may be wrapped around their filtering process.
People are always going to be at risk of believing something that is false.
However, we do it every day; everyone does it. If you go to the doctor, and you listen to their opinion and do not do the extensive lit review that they have done concerning your disease, you are letting an "expert" limit the amount of information you actually contend with. I agree that the doctor should not be allowed to limit your access to information; yet, the doctor's expertise does limit the information and choice set you contend with. This happens whenever you interact with an expert as an expert.
However, there is nothing in the open letter concerning the nudge behavior that says the government limited access to information; most of the accusations amount to the government emphasized certain data over others and exaggerated certain costs and benefits and used emotional appeals when presenting anything. We even have knowledge that the nudge unit is using the covert psych strategies to affect behavior. Nothing says the government limited access to information (if we are going to hold the government to account for something, we should be sure they actually did it).
It’s pretty clear that the government instructed the social media to do it. Oh, there was no memo, but neither did Henry II issue a memo about Thomas Becket. It was simply enough to publicly exclaim “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest”. The similar instructions from the White House were obvious.
And now, it’s considered “terrorism” to express a view contrary to that of the regime.
So, you might call that suppression of information.
First, I find it rich that you are making a point by using a story about Thomas Becket that was made up in the 18th century, 600 years after Becket was assassinated. That, the 5 eye witness reports that all roughly agree with each other, tell a story that looks a bit more like someone resisting arrest. https://blog.britishmuseum.org/thomas-becket-the-murder-that-shook-the-middle-ages/
Second, given that you have offered the false story as factual. Henry II and the knights involved might have a case of slander against you, if they were alive today.
Third, given that Facebook claims that in April through June of 2020 they had already taken down 7 million posts "spreading false information about covid and put warning notes on 98 million more," I am wondering what White House you are talking about. Trump was in the White House in April through June of 2020. So, are you accusing Trump's administration of this suppression of information? Or, am I correct in inferring that you were pointing to the Biden administration? This is of course impossible; there was no Biden White House in April through June of 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/11/facebook-covid-misinformation-takedowns/
Fourth, it is quite true that politicians across the spectrum have been calling for Facebook to do one thing or another with regard to censorship or not censoring or whatever. However, there is no law on the books at the federal level which gives the federal government any power over Facebook on this topic. Thus, at best what you are claiming is that certain politicians peer-pressured Facebook to act. It does not stop there, though. It is also true that legions of people that are nominally Facebook's customers have been calling for the social media site and other social media sites to police false statements more effectively. You also have other customers of Facebook calling for the social media site to stop censoring conservative voices. Short story, Facebook is receiving "peer-pressure" from it's customers! And, like most good companies in a free market have attempted to respond to their customers. To call this suppression is to make a mockery of the word suppression.
I take it that you have never tried the internet in China. Neither the the US government nor any private organization has the power in the US to scrub the internet of things they deem undesirable. The Great Chinese Fire Wall is suppression of information. That you actually have to do a legitimate search on a general search engine or a literature review of an academic journal database, like PubMed, instead of getting your information on Facebook IS NOT SUPRESSION BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.
Fifth, can you point to a law that defines opinions that are contrary to the opinions of "the regime" as terrorism? Because, I seem to remember, and still get emails from the Trump political action committee that defines anyone that has an opinion different from Trump un-American, a traitor, a socialist, and a threat to America. So, unless you can point to a law, I am going to call that "terrorism" BS as the status quo of US political discourse.
Yeah I remember when that book came out (I may have a copy of it lying around another example of too many books to read)
"The dilemma of choice" or something like that
Yes but there comes a point when you are so well nudged, you do not see other conflicting points and actively disparage those who do. That's the goal of every professional nudger.
When is that point? If someone is convinced by the arguments presented in favor of one side, have they been nudged so much that they actively disparage conflicting opinions or have they made a rational decision based on the evidence presented? If someone makes an objection to your position, is a legitimate rebuttal "you have just been nudged too much"? How would you present evidence to support that rebuttal? Is it possible that one person's "nudged too much" is another person's "rational decision based on the evidence available to them, which they believe is the extent of the evidence"?
That point is when nudging becomes programming and the individual's ability to hear and consider and respond to new information shuts down. Critical thinking turns off because they know everything, or think they do. For example, a doctor (an epidemiologist) once said to me, "If it were important I would already know it." This guy could not learn, adapt, change, or evolve.
That point occurs once belief takes over and there is a structural change in the brain. It is quite common among scientists, as well as Trumpsters and Liberals.
Loren is an epidemiologist and a true believer, just for context.
It's my understanding that epidemiologists are not actually scientists, they just say they are.
Instead, they're professional nudgers with projections generally off by a magnitude. Which is okay because they're not data scientists - their job is to gin up fear and manipulate compliance with various tools of propaganda. They will, for example, change the definition of a gene manipulation to "vaccine" to trick people into believing an experimental and untested gene manipulation is safe, as most vaccines actually are. Social engineering is a well-established branch of epidemiology.
They are True Believers because of their self-righteous belief that their ends justify their means. This makes them the the butt-end of jokes by real scientists.
Here is the Yale study design for the social engineering methodology for epidemiologists:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04460703
Agree although I'd love it if they would first obey the LAWS (Nurenberg for informed consent for starters) maybe in future if we ever get our specific forms of government back I'd also be very interested in your suggestion
excellent, and you presented this clearly, which I appreciate
Maybe Tommy doesn't see the flag as an "overt display of jingoism", but rather as a symbol of the values he holds. "Values first" and the flag as a symbol of the values. Maybe that is also why the U.S. flag is often used around the world as a symbol of freedom from every sort of tyranny. A symbol not so much of nationalism, but of the potential of free individuals.
Granted, our government has not lived up to those values, but I think that to a lot of people, and not just Americans, the flag represents those ideals.
Symbols mean different things to different people. I'm with the people who use the flag to represent the ideals of liberty, broadly. And as I said, I like Tommy a lot. I saw him interview David Wiseman, also, and really liked his ability to zoom in to details with a subject, then zoom out to the big picture. Critical.
Cass Sunstein was in the Obama Admin, who took a lot of heat for a recommendation he made for empowering secret government influencers to patrol social media and try to direct the conversation in a way the government wanted. It was a purely authoritarian impulse, manipulating people in secret, which was a warning to anyone paying attention, of the authoritarianism in the heart of the Left, which unfortunately not a lot of people noticed.
They talk about the nudge on public radio in such an innocuous way. In practice around Covid their nudge took on a kind of desperation mixed with unimpeachable arrogance, wielding their nudge like trebuchet, lobbing volleys of shame and separation, demoliting social cohesion.
The Right did much the same with false equivalence and over-the-top "Lock her up!" The Left now seems more self-righteous as a reaction and the ends for both media created sides justifies the means. The guard rails are off and we've descended into religious fanaticism where it's kill or be killed. I blame the media for ginning up fake existential fear. It's not the People, but their self-selected media feed.
To be clear, they are enemy combatants.
The real enemy is not the Left so much but the "Kunlangeta" who have mesmerized the Left.
Are we not continually nudged, starting with our parents who were themselves nudged to get a job, pay taxes, and obey? Our friends nudge with peer pressure. The media nudges with continual programming. The police nudge with night sticks and fines. In school we're nudged to get that gold star. Religion nudges you into their ideology of belief. Continually we are shaped and slapped around to produce the right answer for whatever the authority demands.
If you question authority you're nudging them and they'll schedule you for directed, intensive, and insistent nudging. The initial soft nudging by cultural engineers is a suggestion that can escalate into a demand for compliance with the threat of prison.
As a social control mechanism, technology applies subtle invisible nudges to population masses, while monitoring and measuring the effect on individual units. As necessary, more targeted shocks can be deployed.
The result is Utopia where everyone thinks the same because dissent is crushed. Happily, it's all for our own good.
How to use the "frog in hot water" phenomenon for fun, power and profit.
FUD + FOGS = Control
(Fear Uncertainty and Doubt + Fear Obligation Guilt and Shame)
Nudging vaccine compliance:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/manipulation-guilt-shame-vaccine-compliance/
Fab link, adore CHD and the work they do for an informed public. They pick up a key point most Americans would be shocked to learn. The NDAA 2012 authorized propaganda use against our own citizens, something expressly prohibited before that.
"A National Defense Authorization Act amendment in 2012 that legalized the use of propaganda on the American public makes it easier for governments to create self-serving narratives.
And thanks to a multi-billion dollar budget from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we are under the influence of the best messages money can buy — whether or not those messages are true."
We subsidize our own indoctrination...
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. https://highlanderjuan.com/blog/early-morning-thoughts/the-horrible-smith-mundt-modernization-act-of-2012-smma/
Great post and nice to see the fig leaf used to put this giant hole in the propaganda ban, thanks. Voice of America propaganda aimed at Cuba could be heard by Americans in Florida which broke the no propaganda rule. To fix that and be in compliance all propaganda aimed at Americans was opened up.
Gotta love Congress who make no laws without loopholes to back door the activity theoretically banned. See insider trading for a good feel for how "laws" protect the criminal class.
That was a good read. Thanks for the link.
The nudgers are being nudged over the cliff. Facistbook has all kinds of excuses why its share price dropped like a rock. Same with Twaddle.
But we all know a big reason they have: they nudged themselves out of being seen as the source for “the other side of the story”.
The very good thing about the last two years is the huge reduction in childish credulity among a sizable segment of the population.
I woke up to the media propaganda game in the 1970’s. I won’t say I haven’t been fooled in the intervening decades — wisdom is, after all, cumulative. But a healthy dose of intelligent skepticism has served me well.
It’s my hope that lesson has a bit broader appreciation as a consequence of two years of blatant bullshit.
I wish your description of fb stock price plunge was correct. But alas, it is almost totally due to Apple's new privacy settings. I acknowledge that FB has lost users (me among them), but I bet those users were not invested in the FB world, so no great loss.
I was a heavy user, and early during the pandemic ran a discussion forum for evidence regarding treatment therapies (before serving 8 or 10 suspensions).
I hope I am wrong. You were the type of user FB would hate to lose, hence negative economic effect on profits.
That’s their excuse. As I understand it, the reality is that they had to report a net loss of users, or at least zero growth in users.
Am I the only one wondering about the graph that reads the peak of the bell curve for women’s height to be around 5’4” (sounds good) and men’s height to be around 6’8”? Meanwhile I appreciate the mental exercise here, I queued the book Nudge on my reading list
Look back at the *two* graphs. I artificially increased the height of men in the second one in order to show an example of a bimodal distribution.
"Too much to take" in what sense? Mental health issues arsing, social disruption or they wake up and realise what's going on?
Germ Warfare had a great podcast on this too. Patrick Fagen.
Interesting. If anything I have learned from the past 3 years is that those in leadership 1) will use any means necessary to convince people 2) they don't care about you. My desire has been to figure out their game, so I can become as good as them and win. I want the side of good to win.
Thank you for explaining in detail how the peer pressure (nudge) we all felt works. Have linked to your substack in my substack re an aussie perspective. To quote a good Doc and outlier of "concensus" medicine shoved on us by the Nudge Nerds. "READ THIS" (if you want to stand a chance of understanding what is happening and who -or rather WHAT - is controlling your narrative) https://feesgarden.substack.com/p/the-nudge-sequel-first-nudge-nudge?r=sldla&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
No amount of nudging will make me take the vaccine. I had already determined through a priori logic that it was dangerous before it even came out.
Thanks for teaching me about the nudge with some good graphs. I also enjoyed seeing how systems can go bimodal. Here is a thought for you, which in working on the implications.
Which I think epigenetics is key. Mass vaccination as a policy will always fail to achieve better public health because adverse reactions are non-normal processes.
I also think these mRNA jabs are non-ergodic nightmares which we are watching their awful effects continue to unfold. I think the migration of the nano particles into the organs is starting to occur whose effect is pronounced in boosters as described here is one of the non-normal effects that would either be dismissed as coincidence if observed in early testing.
https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Vaccine-immune-interactions-and-booster-shots.pdf
I watch UK Column news to bypass the obscene propaganda broadcast by the BBC et al. So they enlightened me about the Mindspace document and the part of the government that you refer to. Apparently using psychological ploys on an unsuspecting population to cause untold mental, societal, physical and economic damage is something the UK is willing to share worldwide.