Nudge meets Edge: A Boxing Day Story

I happened to come across this post from 2011 about an article from one of the Nudgelords promoting the ridiculous “traditional” idea of modeling risk aversion as “a primitive; each person had a parameter, gamma, that measured her degree of risk aversion.” That was before I had a full sense of how silly/dangerous the whole nudge thing was (see also here) . . . but, also, it featured a link to the notorious Edge foundation, home of Jeffrey Epstein and his pals. All those Great Men; there’s hardly enough room at NPR and Ted to hold all of them.

P.S. Again, why am I picking on these guys? The Edge foundation: are these not the deadest of dead horses? But remember what they say about beating a dead horse. The larger issue—a smug pseudo-humanistic contempt for scientific measurement, along with an attitude that money plus fame = truth—that’s still out there.

5 thoughts on “Nudge meets Edge: A Boxing Day Story

  1. Edge certainly has an extensive list of high profile contributors. I couldn’t find Wansink or Walker or several other culprits that have appeared on this blog, but Ariely is still there (in glowing terms). Reputations still matter – but unfortunately they depend more on fame than integrity. Of course, Ariely has not been found guilty of anything other than his self-admitted carelessness (and, of course, who can avoid being careless while publishing 400+ articles?). But the Ariely affair still disturbs me due to how ready he has been to put it all behind him without having to bear responsibility. Retraction = Absolution I guess. And 4xx articles = 4xx-1 articles is the cost. To be fair, he did remove the retracted work from his vitae. Personally, I’d rather see the published article and the retraction both stay on his vitae.

    • Dale:

      Edge is slightly different from Ted, partly because Ted is about the science (or purports to be) while Edge is all about the geniuses. Wansink, for example, even before he was exposed had the image of a wacky guy with all these fun experiments, but he didn’t give off the genius vibe. The other difference between Edge and Ted is that Edge has this edgy edge of sexism, the “great man” thing. Remember when the bad-boy “evilicious” Edgelord was talking about how his ideas were too important to be stopped by “schoolmarms”? I would not claim that this attitude was all trickling down from Edge’s most famous funder, just that this all fit together. And, for all of Wansink’s and Walker’s flaws, I don’t see sexist attitudes in the mix.

  2. That was really a tough break for Edge, and then Bono got so much acclaim as Morocco’s goalkeeper. But he really kept the band together for Zooropa…when it really should have been dissolved. So, I’ll go with Nudge, rhymes with fudge, which is nice when it is a bit firm and flaky rather than gooey.

    But where is this on the bracket?

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