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Comment by martingoodson | Hacker News Reader

This is a poor headline (from The Economist) that does not reflect the referenced work. The correct interpretation is that nudges need to be tested in the field to find out if they work. This is common knowledge in behavioural science.

Experts are not good at predicting which nudges are going to work in practice[1]. Trials are always needed.

This is no different to the requirement for drug trials. Drugs are not released just on the say so of pharmacologists, empirical evidence is needed. And yet nobody says pharmacology is looking ‘shaky’.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115126119

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I wonder if the problem with "nudge" is that for publicity reasons, people only call it a nudge if it sounds like a tiny thing that doesn't sound like it would work. If it's an obvious intervention, such as a default option in a pension form, or higher prices on tobacco, or condom vending machines in hotel restrooms, they don't call it a nudge anymore.

And I also have the feeling some of these may be babies that the Economist's editors would like to throw out with the bathwater.

Default options in forms are the standard example of a nudge, a tax however is definitely not a nudge, the article actually explicitly says so.

In that big meta study that questioned the efficiency of nudges, it was said in the discussion on HN that they excluded default options from the definition of nudges.

Either way, the line seems arbitrary to me, and it's part of why I think they're moving the goalposts.

I don't know what people on HN said, but it's the first example of nudges of you look here (and pretty much anywhere else):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#Types_of_nudges

The article in question was "No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias". That study apparently counted default choices on forms as "structural interventions" - a term wide enough to usually include immunisation programs and taxes.

I don't follow. The Economist's editors aren't the ones deciding what is or isn't counted as a nudge in the academic literature.

The headline doesn't say nudges. It says behavioural interventions.

(and as far as I can tell, the academic literature isn't consistent on what counts as a nudge or not)

Nudges are behavioural interventions. It's just a headline.

Nudges are basically the opposite of dark patterns.

If a headline seems dubious when you swap the two then it's probably got an agenda.

"Dark Patterns don't work anyway, so we should carry on using them" vs "Nudges don't work anyway, we should stop using them"

https://www.simpleusability.com/inspiration/2019/03/dark-pat...

Nudge does seem to imply some degree subtlety. In a colloquial sense, >100% tax rates on cigarettes is more of a shove than a nudge.

Pretty much every policy stick short of a bullet seems to be sailing under the flag of a nudge these days.

Absolutely: the definition of a nudge (Thaler and Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism”) was meant to include that it is cheap and easy to avoid, and therefore makes no difference to the (mythical) fully rational consumer. Taxes or other price interventions absolutely do not qualify.

Germans speak German; wow people store information and take up the routines their understanding of that information implies. Field test complete.

Social science is based on observing the same world as “hard” science. We already have plenty of models and theory about information transmission.

Human biology retains information it’s structure encounters; social science solved.

Wrapping hard science in cultural semantics does not exclude the hard science explanation from being the right explanation. The social science explanation is superfluous and almost intentionally manipulative; professors will give extra fake points for jumping higher. But if the fake points are of little real world value, people don’t care. It’s a parlor trick that works on the ignorant, not a fundamental cognitive function of everyone.

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