Videos in: 2008
CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION
"These findings may capture people's imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism. But even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. It just means that you are more likely to be genetically predisposed. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases."
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LIFE IS THE WAY THE ANIMAL IS IN THE WORLD
"The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem."
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Master Class 2008: The Irony of Poverty (Class 5)
"I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions."
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Master Class 2008: Two Big Things Happening in Psychology Today (Class 4)
"There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!"
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Master Class 2008: The Psychology of Scarcity (Class 3)
Let's put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let's ask, "Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?" One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question.—Sendhil Mullainathan
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Master Class 2008: Improving Choices with Machine Readable Disclosure (Class 2)
At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal.—Richard Thaler
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Master Class 2008: Liberatarian Paternalism: Why it is Impossible Not to Nudge (Class 1)
If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way. —Richard Thaler
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BIG DATA COMMERCE VS BIG DATA SCIENCE
"What I would like to argue for is to stop using the idea of big data as this big rubric to cover all these practices within businesses, like Google, that don't really have the structure to close the empirical loop to determine what part of their success is based on scientifically replicable and testable analytic results versus science, where that's really all we care about. Science is never, in my opinion, going to just get automatic, and it's very rarely easy."
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FROM INFORMATION TO MOTIVATION
"What motivates people? What is it that people want to figure out, and when do they decide, "Hey, I've got to go find some information," and how can we get them to do that more, to find the information, and then use it in their life?"
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THE NEXT RENAISSANCE
"Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.
But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog."
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