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koenfucius

@koenfucius.bsky.social

2.1K followers 230 following 6.9K posts

Accidental behavioural economist koenfucius.substack.com

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 5d

Blogged: How we choose what to see
An intriguing twitter conversation between Paul Graham and @ianleslie.bsky.social last weekend inspired me to this post on motivated interpretation - our near-inescapable tendency to interpret ambiguity in ways that suit our world view:
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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2h

Quantification rules—to make up our mind on a decision, whether it’s the purchase of a car, hiring a worker or whatever, we tend to take guidance from *numerically* expressed characteristics (4.5⭐️, 7.5/10, 97%), regardless how important they are:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 4h

Similarity in neural responses to movie clips predicts whether strangers become friends, and friendships that grew closer over time involved people who had been more neurally similar as strangers, research by Shen et al suggests:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 7h

How to prevent your todo list torturing you?

We can experience anticipatory joy 👍, but also anticipatory stress 👎

Two tactics can help:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 8h

People lie for personal gain—regardless whether doing so harms an ingroup or outgroup member.

They also lie to benefit someone else—and significantly more so if it benefits an ingroup member, research by Martuza et al suggests:

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via coauthor @jayvanbavel

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 11h

What can make even like-minded people profoundly disagree?

The ambiguity of language enables the precursor to motivated reasoning: motivated interpretation—simplifying ambiguity into facts that fit our worldview by choosing what we see and don’t see.

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 13h

Wanneer de ref een speler uitsluit, is dat een feit.

Maar de betekenis ervan hangt ervan af aan welke kant je staat—een gerechtvaardigde reactie op een duidelijke fout, of een partijdige beslissing.

Mijn @apache.be stukje, Hoe we kiezen wat we zien:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 13h

“Even if you’re uncomfortable with the idea, there are a lot of animal sexual shenanigans in the world. And sometimes they happen between totally different species.”

Female monkeys riding male deer—not for transportation—is only the tip of the iceberg:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 23h

If only experts didn’t live in a bubble. But even people who merely think they’re experts tend to dwell in one.

Dave Trott has plenty of reasons why that is not a good idea:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

Much of the advice out there on work-life balance misses the point—it’s not something you can achieve, argues Matt Grawitch.

You don’t ‘achieve’ balance on a bike—you continually *allocate* your weight to where it’s needed, and work-life is much the same:

open.substack.com/pub/mattgraw...

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

A romantic relationship with the boss—good (for you) while it lasts, research in Finland by Macdonald et al suggests. On average, pay rises by 6% (but retention of other workers drops by 6%); also, upon breakup, pay falls by 18%:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

When the referee excludes a player, that is a fact.

But what it means depends on what side one is on—either a legitimate reaction to a clear foul, or a dumb mistake or partiality.

Meet the precursor of motivated reasoning—motivated interpretation:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

De ambiguïteit in onze taal maakt het mogelijk wat wordt gezegd of geschreven op uiteenlopende manieren te interpreteren.

Daarvan maken we gretig gebruik om te kiezen wat we zien, en het op een eenzijdige manier op te vatten.

Mijn @apache.be stukje:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

Did everything that happened have to happen exactly the way it did?

Jimmy Alfonso Licon digs into fatalism, with his hypothetical time-shuffling machine—well he just *had* to. Or did he?

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

It can be hard to spot manipulative nudges on commercial websites, causing you to pay for something you didn’t want, locking you into a subscription etc.

@richard-mills.bsky.social developed a Chrome extension that detects, highlights and rates them for you:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

From echo chambers to echo platforms—fragmentation of social networks leads to ideologically homogeneous platforms.
Research by Di Martino et al analyses 9 networks and, mapping them on key distinguishing dimensions:

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HT @jayvanbavel

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

New research using 2.5k chess players with an active Chess Federation rating finds robust evidence for overconfidence,m (despite accurate, precise and continuous feedback) and for consistency with the Dunning-Kruger effect, reports @abmarkman.bsky.social:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

Resource allocation is certainly often the means for implementing social policy—subsidies and tax exemptions, or conversely taxation and levies—but alongside other policy tools (eg regulations, from rental property requirements and restricted opening times for pubs to clean air zones).

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

Cats are peculiar animals, very special in every way, including their pigmentation—unlike other redhead humans, orangutans, Irish setters and other similarly coloured mammals, ginger cats have their own gene that produces their orange fur:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

Isn’t that mainly a matter of resource allocation?
(Still, in health economics, while the cost unit is $$, the benefit unit is QALY, in which Q is a precariously subjective, and individually specific affair. How many knee replacements to a stage 4 cancer life extension?)

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 1d

A settlement in a car finance miss-selling scandal means millions of customers will receive a small windfall of around £700.

What will they do with it?

Behavioural economics research sheds light on this question, writes @stuartmills.bsky.social:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2d

A ‘landmark’ study claiming vaccines cause chronic illness is rife with statistical flaws and biases, leading to unsupported conclusions, biostatistician @jssm2334 explains:

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(More landfill than landmark, it seems)

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2d

Imagine aliens visited Earth in 399 BCE, looking for life sufficiently intelligent to make contact with.

They’d have met Socrates!

So, why did they never come back?

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2d

Housing crisis, what housing crisis?

If you do economics right, everyone can win—@professorstevekeen.bsky.social explains how a duo of measures could make houses affordable, without lowering their prices, and without depriving the banks of their profits:

profstevekeen.substack.com/p/remedies-f...

koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2d

Research by Lee et al suggests LLMs exhibit human-like cognitive-behavioural biases characteristic of gambling addiction😬—like illusion of control, gambler's fallacy, and loss chasing; increasing models’ autonomy amplified risk-taking and bankruptcies:

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koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 2d

The ambiguity in our language means what people write or say can often be interpreted in different ways.

We happily take advantage of this opportunity to choose what we see and engage in motivated interpretation.

Here is how and why:

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