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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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.