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No, my main thesis is the nudging is just euphemism for tricking. I do not have any axe to grind against anybody. I used an analogy, it could have been anything else like for instance EULA "agreements" or something like that.
Additionally, the ecosystem of nudging also creates perverse incentives that diminishes the role of education. I could have used an example of End User License Agreements that are purposefully written in order for the public to not understand their choice by relying on impulse choice of the consumer to get to the thing they want just one click away. There is no TL;DR at the beginning of EULA in red and exclamation marks that describes what things are they giving up in exchange for the trinket. They just see one green "I agree" button and the reward behind it. And this is seen as some enlightened cutting of the proverbial Gordian Knot - no need to educate the public or explain anything. We just decide what they need.
So yes, for me the nudge really is just another synonym for deception.
I think you're using "nudge" very differently from how economists use it. An EULA is not a nudge. Making a 401k or organ donation from opt-in to opt-out is a nudge. You create analogies that are different from the thing you are referring to, and then use those analogies to justify describing the original (very different) thing.
I am using it exactly as economists want it to. The only difference is that economists love to use examples of "good" nudging. Even in your examples the 401k and organ donations are supposed to be universally accepted as a good things and as long as the nudges are used in this good direction they get quality of the nudge. Except when some religious family finds out that they cannot bury their loved one whole because she was used as a source of organs automatically creating feeling of being tricked and used. Yeah, she should have opted out from the scheme, and fuck her religion anyway - we utilitiarian nudgers know what is best for humanity and it still counts as a nudge as opposed to trick, she and her family should have known better.
Also nudging is not only about opt-in/opt-out schemes, this is just the default type of the nudge. There are other nudges like creating a psychological anchor or changing the salience of certain options and many other tricks. I purposefully used examples of what community here would probably see as a "bad" nudge but that is to show the point. I could have used your organ donation example: to make it as a default option reflects certain ethos of technocratic "nudgning" class and they impose it on the rest of the population. My argument is that they are tricks and that "nudging" is just euphemism, paradoxically by anchoring the very existence of nudges as organ donation or 401k is in and of itself dishonest description that is supposed to psychologically predispose you to agree with the premise. They do not show negative examples of nudges, they make only the positive ones as salient. Go figure.
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