Tag: Cass Sunstein

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Education Reading

Latest Read: How to Become Famous

How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be by Cass R. Sunstein

How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be by Cass R. Sunstein

Cass holds a AB and JD from Harvard. 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.

How to Become Famous investigates mechanisms behind why certain individuals, groups, or works become famous while others, in fact superior in quality or talent are overlooked and even forgotten.

Clearly Cass is not focusing on a step-by-step guide to achieving fame, it is in fact exploring unpredictable and often times arbitrary forces that result in fame and fortune and those who fade into obscurity.

Cass is revealing the role of luck actually serendipity. It’s the fact that talent and resilience were always important but simply not enough to achieve fame and fortune. Rather its about being in the right place at the right time: chance or having the right connections.

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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

Categories
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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