Tag: Cass Sunstein

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Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Conformity

Conformity: The Power of Social Influences by Cass Sunstein. He is currently a professor at Harvard and was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.

Conformity: The Power of Social Influences by Cass R. Sunstein

From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.

In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway. Furthermore in 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health.

In fact, his previous books Nudge and Noise are all best sellers and provide wonderful insights to human behavior. The focus of this book is addressing decisions influenced by social pressure.

Similarly, this can be for the better (logic, facts, and even experiments) or worse. So, it is very easy today to witness irrational social media posts influencing decisions.

Conformity has two faces

Cass begins by sharing a baseline that conformity is be positive or negative. As we know, conformity is a basic requirement and is proving to be necessary today. However, the focus is to understand the larger circumstances and become aware of the effects of conformity upon your decision making process. In addition, there is a real drive to understand the full impact of social media placing new pressures upon individuals to make decisions:

On social media, that happens all the time. The result can be to lead people to errors and even to illness and death. “Fake news” can spread like wildfire; informational cascades are the culprits. In 2017 and 2018, that was a particular concern for Facebook, whose platform has often been used as a basis for the rapid transmission of falsehoods.
pgs. 104-105.

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Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Noise

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by noted authors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. Noise is simply random, unpredictable decision making that cannot be explained. At the same time, is not accountable. This is very perplexing today.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

At the same time, this is not easy to fully understand. Here is a good outline provided by the book:

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients — or that two judges in the same courthouse give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime.
Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants — or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint.
Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official makes different decisions, depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.

As a result, it is amazing to understand how and why people from all walks of life make really bad judgements. The fact that it can be quantified and even controlled offers us hope. However, based upon our crazy world today it only offers hope.

How many times have you found yourself impacted by Noise?

Sections that certainly stick most with organizations is within their hiring process. The authors really hit a home run here. Based upon their research and insights, this is worth the price of admission alone. Issues like prejudice are actually bias. When assessing decisions that go wrong, noise is the standard deviation of errors, while bias is the mean itself.

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Education Innovation Reading

Noise Preview

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by noted authors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. This upcoming release certainly reminds me that I first read Daniel’s Thinking, Fast and Slow six years ago. This Noise preview is certainly a book everyone should read. I have found many references to Daniel’s work across a series of books that I have been reading over the last couple of years. I attribute the same embrace of Cass’ deeply insightful book Nudge, which I re-read just last year. Above all, they make a powerful 1-2 punch in Behavioral Science.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Noise looks to be just as compelling as the following premise: Consider two doctors in the same city giving the same patients different diagnoses. Additionally, consider two judges working in the same courthouse giving different sentences to people for the same crime. In addition, consider the impact of different food inspectors providing different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants.
In contrast, consider that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, makes different decisions in the morning versus the late afternoon, or decisions made on Mondays versus Wednesdays. Following these examples of ‘noise’ the authors will reveal, a variability in judgments that should be identical.

I am very much looking forward to learning how noise makes impactful contributions to errors in literally all fields. Obviously ‘noise’ is located wherever people make decisions. Yet it appears most if not all of us are somewhat oblivious to the role of chance in our decisions. I certainly cannot wait to read this book!

2021 DLD Conference | Book Talk: Noise – A Flaw in Human Judgment

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Nudge

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler, and Cass Sunstein. At the time of publication both Thaler and Sustain were faculty at the University of Chicago. Cass departed for a role in the Obama Administration then began teaching at Harvard. In addition, Richard won the Nobel prize in economics in 2017.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein

Nudge certainly brings out the small, subtle pushes that our modern-day world makes in swaying one’s opinion or real-world choices.

I was certainly finding myself laughing at passages between Thaler and Sunstein, really enjoying their work very much

Admittedly, stepping back from the often suggested, and overused technology ‘hammer-and-nail’ approach to computer problems, we unquestionably desire to simply change behaviors.

Within Part 1: Humans and Econs / Section 3: Following the Herd Thaler displays how priming may be worth your consideration.

Comparatively, the choices we on a daily basis are proving to be often poor. Nudge certainly helps us identify how we make these choices.

On the other hand, the surprise by Richard and Cass, our choices are really never presented in a neutral way. Nevertheless, this is how we become susceptible to biases, which may lead us to make poor decisions.

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Latest read: Too Big to Know

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger is an amazing look at how vast amounts of knowledge in our digital world has changed our ability to not only comprehend data, but how data and the internet rewire how our brain’s process information.
Too Big to KnowIn a way this book is about networks of knowledge stored in databases and in people. So what happens to all the knowledge and expertise we now confront? Outside of it being somewhat accessible on the net, the large amounts of data are forcing us to reimagine data infrastructure.

This is pushing development of large “big data” solutions that will have the ability to process and dashboard results that are more easily “digestable” for larger and larger groups of people across the spectrum.

Weinberger confirms that there is so much data, information & knowledge today for the first time in our collective history that no single person can process it all. And that is not always a good thing. He stated “We see all too clearly how impotent facts are in the face of firmly held beliefs. We have access to more facts than ever before, so we can see more convincingly than ever before that facts are not doing the job we hired them for.”

And at the same time accounting for human nature – access to more data will only reinforce the worse as illustrated by Cass Sunstein: “Studies have shown that when people speak only with those with whom they agree, they not only become more convinced of their own views, they tend to adopt more extreme versions of those views.” And now you know the rest of the story.

Too Big to Know reveals in chapter eight how we are managed today. In the past we learned about Jack Welch of GE. He was the final, top decision maker. But today with wikis, blogs and mobile technology GE’s strategic plans are made from the bottom up: “The CEO of General Electric could be entirely off the grid, but still GE’s engineers, product managers, and marketing folks are out on the Net, exploring and trying out the ideas that affect their branch of the larger decision tree.” This is the ‘wikipedia’ approach. This is also something Weinberger acknowledges in Don Tapscott’s work Wikinomics.

Finally, I could not agree more with Weinberger’s example (Chapter five) regarding a marketplace of echoes. He describes the impact of David Halberstam‘s award winning book The Best and the Brightest. (my review here) Halberstam attempted to explain how the Kennedy White House, full of highly educated, dedicated men (McGeorge Bundy, George Ball, Chester Bowles, Robert McNamara) could have failed so badly in Vietnam. Their efforts are now very distant, recalled most often as an analogy to our country’s worst mistake. But Halberstam’s question remains deeply unsettling: How did the best and the brightest get us into the ‘hell’ of Vietnam? If these men, so well educated and worldly, erred so badly, how can we trust the advice of lesser men?

No better lesson on diversity than our failure in Vietnam. This is a very good book.