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Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford.
Here’s the catch: odds are that what Levine is saying is technically correct - truthful, but misleading.
Sure, they (people in those big businesses) might not be active and directly adding sludge. They might not be encouraging it. Or measuring it. But it’s there. Because they created the perfect conditions for it to thrive, as the author shows.
And, sure, odds are they are not targetting the author; that sludge is for every single body in a similar situation.
Why this matters: because any potential law punishing sludge should disregard esoteric concepts like “intention”, and focus solely on what the customer gets. If the customer is getting sludged, it doesn’t matter if the business says “trust us ( = be gullible filth), we don’t have the intention!” - the business should get the short end of the legal stick.
Tldr: car steering and breaking didn’t work, it was a repeatable problem, none of the mechanics could repeat it. After 108 days Ford re-bought the car and issued a refund to the owner.
Read the books nudge, and sludge.
Why do so many people misspell brake?
homonyms, hooked on phonics. There always their waiting to trip me up over they’re.
Actually, don’t read the books. The concept is pretty much made up. Here is an entertaining podcast about that:
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/cc36ce12d2fd1a171630d1733998b414
I’ve read nudge, whats wrong with behavioral economics to influence behavior? it seems to work
No, it doesn’t work - that is exactly the problem. If you don’t want to listen to the podcast (which would be a shame), they list a number of studies in the show notes.
There are a few select cases for which personal nudges work, but only to a miniscule degree which is far less than what the authors claimed. And naturally, proposing nudge theory hinders actual, much more effective, systematic changes that would really benefit people - and that is a major problem.
It’s a face, fake feel good strategy that can be employed to claim improving a given system - like attaching a little plastic string to the plastic cap of your beverage container so companies can claim to have improved the plastic littering problem.
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/cc36ce12d2fd1a171630d1733998b414
Where do I find the show notes? This is all i see at the link you provided
I’d really like to see and engage with the thesis here, but it’s not presented in a accessible way. Could you give the argument please?
The papers are listed at the bottom of the screenshot you posted, I agree it’s badly formatted so not immediately obvious / visible.
However, I can provide sources later on, I actually still have to get back to another post to provide some papers, but it’ll be a while until I have the time to do that.
ok, guess its these three papers
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2017.1356304
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1356389015590218
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107346118
Our results show that choice architecture interventions overall promote behavior change with a small to medium effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.43 (95% CI [0.38, 0.48])
So the meta-analysis says nudging works, but not to some massive degree.
Given that you quoted from the last paper, there was a response from Maier et al. to that paper explicitly, correcting for publication bias and finding no effect when “nudging”:
Paywall
they call it something else. I worked in programming a customer support system, the motive for putting so many fucking barriers before you reach a person is so that you can fix your own issue without costing them resources.
On the other end, there are goals that each case and etc has, which may include calls. If you call them and fuck it up, the case milestones stay positive, instead of not calling on time and getting the goal fucked.
Let’s be honest, that’s what they say, but it’s a half truth. The other half is that solving your problem even when it’s 100% their fuckup still costs them money, so they want you to jump through hoops of fire to get what you fairly deserve.
It’s just another b.s. form of gouging the customer.
