Repeating my reply to someone:
Sunstein didn't merely change his mind in response to events. He told people four weeks ago that if they held the view he now holds, they had a brain defect. He and others rationalized a delayed response that now forces the wrenching shutdown.
Sunstein didn't merely change his mind in response to events. He told people four weeks ago that if they held the view he now holds, they had a brain defect. He and others rationalized a delayed response that now forces the wrenching shutdown.
There were intellectually defensible ways to doubt the magnitude of the looming threat and critique the response to it, and this was not one of them.
The only explanation is that back on the savanna telling a guy running from a tiger that he was suffering from cognitive bias must have conferred some survival advantage, though for the life of me I can't figure out how.
Overcoming Bias 
Who would have thought a dehumanized anthropology can become literally dehumanizing?
To be clear, the whole cognitive-bias-hunting enterprise is morally bankrupt and would have been even if people really were overreacting to the virus. Sunstein’s wrong prediction here is a consequence of that rather than the root sin.
In this trying, divided time, I'm pleased to see the bipartisan agreement in my mentions that behavioral economics is terrible.
To those asking why I describe cognitive-bias hunters as morally bankrupt, I wrote about this here: thenewatlantis.com/publications/i…
“Aside from its bleakness, the new rationalism is a philosophical mess. It takes us to be prejudiced beings, with given impulses that are at once devoid of rational content and yet also capable of wreaking havoc on our rational ideas.”
In which Cass Sunstein atones for calling you a dummy for worrying about coronavirus — except not:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
