"'small “nudges', often the sorts of things that we might not think would affect us at all, can have big effects on behavior. Thus the claims that elections are decided by college football games and shark attacks..."
In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book "Nudge," where I believe the term was coined or at least popularized, nudges are almost exclusively presented as the results of "choice architecture," that is the way decisions are presented to people. Of note is that this makes the nudge directly related to the decision itself, and bears resemblance to the butterfly effect only in that both make claims about cause and effect.
To say that behavioral economics is obsessed with trying to hunt down unexpected correlations and publish papers is at best misleading or just plain wrong. I'm sure there are obscure researchers invloved in such pursuits, but it's crazy to characterize the entire discipline this way. He has the caveat "at least how it is presented in the news media." What is that? He should have talked to someone or read something (like Nudge, the book) before ranting. Did he see John Stossel do a segment or something and now he's an expert?
Also of note is that the author is a statistician and political scientist, but his "piranha argument" is a crude attempt at colloquializing analysis that economists (including behavioral economists!) do all the time. Close behind in ubiquity of the economic mantra that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is that "people respond to incentives." The law of unintended consequences was a term that was popularized by a sociologist, but its roots can be found in the writings of Joseph Schumpeter.