How nudge theory is ageing well

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julian Baggini at the Financial Times: “A decade ago, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s book Nudge was on the desk of every serious politician and policy wonk. Its central thesis was alluringly simple: by changing the environment in which we make decisions — the “choice architecture” — people could be encouraged to do things that were good for them and for society without governments compelling them to do anything.

The idea hit the liberal sweet-spot, promising maximum social impact for minimal interference with personal freedom. In 2010, Britain’s government set up its Behavioural Insights Team — popularly known as the “nudge unit” — to put these ideas into practice.

Around the world, others followed. Sunstein is justly proud that 10m poor American children now get free breakfast and lunch during the academic year as a result of just one such intervention making enrolment for free school meals automatic.

Ten years on, Sunstein has produced two new books to win over the unconverted and boost the faith of true believers. One, On Freedom, is a tiny, commuter-friendly pamphlet between hard covers. The other, Trusting Nudges, co-authored with the behavioural economist Lucia A Reisch, is a short, thoughtful, measured and important analysis of what citizens actually think about nudging and why that matters — albeit with the dry, academic furniture of endless tables, footnotes and technical appendices.

Despite the stylistic gulf between them, the two books are best read together as a response to those who would like to give nudges the nudge, claiming that they are covert, manipulative, an insult to human agency and place too much trust in governments and too little on human reason. Not only that, but for all the hype, nudges only work at the margins, delivering relatively minor results without having any major impact on poverty, inequity or inequality.

On Freedom economically and elegantly takes apart the accusation that nudges undermine liberty. Sunstein rightly points out that a nudge is only a nudge by definition if it leaves the nudged able to choose otherwise. For example, the system adopted by several jurisdictions to put people on organ donation registers by default carries with it the right to opt out. Nor are the best nudges covert.

There may not be a sign at the canteen telling you that healthy foods have been put at the front because that’s where you’re more likely to choose them but organisations that adopt this as a policy can and should do so openly. Sunstein’s most important argument is that “we cannot wish choice architecture away”: something has to be on the supermarket shelves that people tend to take more from, something has to be the default for benefit claims. The question is not whether we nudge but how we do so: with forethought or without….(More)”

San Francisco teams up with Uber, location tracker on 911 call responses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gwendolyn Wu at San Francisco Chronicle: “In an effort to shorten emergency response times in San Francisco, the city announced on Monday that it is now using location data from RapidSOS, a New York-based public safety tech company, and ride-hailing company Uber to improve location coordinates generated from 911 calls.

An increasing amount of emergency calls are made from cell phones, said Michelle Cahn, RapidSOS’s director of community engagement. The new technology should allow emergency responders to narrow down the location of such callers and replace existing 911 technology that was built for landlines and tied to home addresses.

Cell phone location data currently given to dispatchers when they receive a 911 call can be vague, especially if the person can’t articulate their exact location, according to the Department of Emergency Management.

But if a dispatcher can narrow down where the emergency is happening, that increases the chance of a timely response and better result, Cahn said.

“It doesn’t matter what’s going on with the emergency if we don’t know where it is,” she said.

RapidSOS shares its location data — collected by Apple and Google for their in-house map apps — free of charge to public safety agencies. San Francisco’s 911 call center adopted the data service in September 2018.

The Federal Communications Commission estimates agencies could save as many as 10,000 lives a year if they shave a minute off response times. Federal officials issued new rules to improve wireless 911 calls in 2015, asking mobile carriers to provide more accurate locations to call centers. Carriers are required to find a way to triangulate the caller’s location within 50 meters — a much smaller radius than the eight blocks city officials were initially presented in October when the caller dialed 911…(More)”.

Drones to deliver medicines to 12m people in Ghana

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Munshi in the Financial Times: “The world’s largest drone delivery network, ferrying 150 different medicines and vaccines, as well as blood, to 2,000 clinics in remote parts of Ghana, is set to be announced on Wednesday.

The network represents a big expansion for the Silicon Valley start-up Zipline, which began delivering blood in Rwanda in 2016 using pilotless, preprogrammed aircraft. The move, along with a new agreement in Rwanda signed in December, takes the company beyond simple blood distribution to more complicated vaccine and plasma deliveries.

“What this is going to show is that you can reach every GPS co-ordinate, you can serve everybody,” said Keller Rinaudo, Zipline chief executive. “Every human in that region or country [can be] within a 15-25 minute delivery of any essential medical product — it’s a different way of thinking about universal coverage.”

Zipline will deliver vaccines for yellow fever, polio, diptheria and tetanus which are provided by the World Health Organisation’s Expanded Project on Immunisation. The WHO will also use the company’s system for future mass immunisation programmes in Ghana.

Later this year, Zipline has plans to start operations in the US, in North Carolina, and in south-east Asia. The company said it will be able to serve 100m people within a year, up from the 22m that its projects in Ghana and Rwanda will cover.

In Ghana, Zipline said health workers will receive deliveries via a parachute drop within about 30 minutes of placing their orders by text message….(More)”.

Open data promotes citizen engagement at the local level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Afua Bruce at the Hill: “The city of Los Angeles recently released three free apps for its citizens: one to report broken street lighting, one to make 311 requests and one to get early alerts about earthquakes. Though it may seem like the city is just following a trend to modernize, the apps are part of a much larger effort to spread awareness of the more than 1,100 datasets that the city has publicized for citizens to view, analyze and share. In other words, the city has officially embraced the open data movement.

In the past few years, communities across the country have realized the power of data once only available to government. Often, the conversation about data focuses on criminal justice, because the demand for this data is being met by high-profile projects like Kamala Harris’ Open Justice Initiative, which makes California criminal justice data available to the citizenry and  the Open Data Policing Project, which provides a publicly searchable database of stop, search and use-of-force data. But the possibilities for data go far beyond justice and show the possibility for use in a variety of spaces, such as efforts to preserve local wildlife, track potholes and  understand community health trends….(More)”.

Finding Wisdom in Politically Polarized Crowds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eamon Duede at Nature Research: “We were seeing that the consumption of ideas seemed deeply related io political alignment, and because our group (Knowledge Lab) is concerned with understanding the social dynamics involved in production of ideas, we began wondering whether and to what extent the political alignment of individuals contributes to a group’s ability to produce knowledge. A Wikipedia article is full of smuggled content and worked into a narrative by a diverse team of editors. Because those articles constitute knowledge, we were curious to know whether political polarization within those teams had an effect on the quality of that production. So, we decided to braid both strands of research together and look at the way in which individual political alignments and the polarization of the teams they form affect the quality of the work that is produced collaboratively on Wikipedia.

To answer this question, we turned not to the article itself, but the immense history of articles on Wikipedia. Every edit to every article, no matter how insignificant, is documented and saved in Wikipedia’s astonishingly massive archives. And every edit to every article, no matter how insignificant, is evaluated for its relevance or validity by the vast community of editors, both robotic and human. Remarkable teamwork has gone into producing the encyclopedia. Some people edit randomly, simply cleaning typos, adding citations, or contributing graffiti and vandalism (I’ve experimented with this, and it gets painted over very quickly, no matter where you put it). Yet, many people are genuinely purposeful in their work, and contribute specifically to topics on which they have both interest and knowledge. They tend and grow a handful of articles or a few broad topics like gardeners. We walked through the histories of these gardens, looking back at who made contributions here and there, how much they contributed, and where. We thought that editors who make frequent contributions to pages associated with American liberalism would hold left leaning opinions, and for conservatism opinions on the right. This was a controversial hypothesis, and many in the Wikipedia community felt that perhaps the opposite would be true, with liberals correcting conservative pages and conservatives kindly returning the favor -like weeding or applying pesticide. But a survey we conducted of active Wikipedia editors found that building a function over the relative number of bits they contributed to liberal versus conservative pages predicted more than a third of the probability that they identified as such and voted accordingly.

Following this validation, we assigned a political alignment score to hundreds of thousands of editors by looking at where they make contributions, and then examined the polarization within teams of editors that produced hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles in the broad topic areas of politics, social issues, and science. We found that when most members of a team have the same political alignment, whether conservative, liberal, or “independent”, the quality of the Wikipedia pages they produce is not as strong as those of teams with polarized compositions of editors (Shi et al. 2019).

The United States Senate is increasingly polarized, but largely balanced in its polarization. If the Senate was trying to write a Wikipedia article, would they produce a high quality article? If they are doing so on Wikipedia, following norms of civility and balance inscribed within Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, committed to the production of knowledge rather than self-promotion, then the answer is probably “yes”. That is a surprising finding. We think that the reason for this is that the policies of Wikipedia work to suppress the kind of rhetoric and sophistry common in everyday discourse, not to mention toxic language and name calling. Wikipedia’s policies are intolerant of discussion that could distort balanced consideration of the edit and topic under consideration, and, given that these policies shut down discourse that could bias proposed edits, teams with polarized viewpoints have to spend significantly more time discussing and debating the content that is up for consideration for inclusion in an article. These diverse viewpoints seem to bring out points and arguments between team members that sharpen and refine the quality of the content they can collectively agree to. With assumptions and norms of respect and civility, political polarization can be powerful and generative….(More)”

Five myths about whistleblowers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dana Gold in the Washington Post: “When a whistleblower revealed the Trump administration’s decision to overturn 25 security clearance denials, it was the latest in a long and storied history of insiders exposing significant abuses of public trust. Whistles were blown on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Watergate coverup, Enron’s financial fraud, the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of domestic electronic communications and, during the Trump administration, the corruption of former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt , Cambridge Analytica’s theft of Facebook users’ data to develop targeted political ads, and harm to children posed by the “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Despite the essential role whistleblowers play in illuminating the truth and protecting the public interest, several myths persist about them, some pernicious.

MYTH NO. 1 Whistleblowers are employees who report problems externally….

MYTH NO. 2 Whistleblowers are either disloyal or heroes….

MYTH NO. 3 ‘Leaker’ is another term for ‘whistleblower.’…

MYTH NO. 4 Remaining anonymous is the best strategy for whistleblowing….

MYTH NO. 5 Julian Assange is a whistleblower….(More)”.

Digital Health Data And Information Sharing: A New Frontier For Health Care Competition?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lucia Savage, Martin Gaynor and Julie Adler-Milstein: “There are obvious benefits to having patients’ health information flow across health providers. Providers will have more complete information about patients’ health and treatment histories, allowing them to make better treatment recommendations, and avoid unnecessary and duplicative testing or treatment. This should result in better and more efficient treatment, and better health outcomes. Moreover, the federal government has provided substantial incentives for the exchange of health information. Since 2009, the federal government has spent more than $40 billion to ensure that most physicians and hospitals use electronic health records, and to incentivize the use of electronic health information and health information exchange (the enabling statute is the Health Information Technology for Clinical Health Act), and in 2016 authorized substantial fines for failing to share appropriate information.

Yet, in spite of these incentives and the clear benefits to patients, the exchange of health information remains limited. There is evidence that this limited exchange in due in part to providers and platforms attempting to retain, rather than share, information (“information blocking”). In this article we examine legal and business reasons why health information may not be flowing. In particular, we discuss incentives providers and platforms can have for information blocking as a means to maintain or enhance their market position and thwart competition. Finally, we recommend steps to better understand whether the absence of information exchange, is due to information blocking that harms competition and consumers….(More)”

Credit denial in the age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aaron Klein: “Banks have been in the business of deciding who is eligible for credit for centuries. But in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data, digital technologies have the potential to transform credit allocation in positive as well as negative directions. Given the mix of possible societal ramifications, policymakers must consider what practices are and are not permissible and what legal and regulatory structures are necessary to protect consumers against unfair or discriminatory lending practices.

In this paper, I review the history of credit and the risks of discriminatory practices. I discuss how AI alters the dynamics of credit denials and what policymakers and banking officials can do to safeguard consumer lending. AI has the potential to alter credit practices in transformative ways and it is important to ensure that this happens in a safe and prudent manner….(More)”.

Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Justin G. Schuetz and Alison Johnston at PNAS: “Efforts to mitigate the current biodiversity crisis require a better understanding of how and why humans value other species. We use Internet query data and citizen science data to characterize public interest in 621 bird species across the United States. We estimate the relative popularity of different birds by quantifying how frequently people use Google to search for species, relative to the rates at which they are encountered in the environment.

In intraspecific analyses, we also quantify the degree to which Google searches are limited to, or extend beyond, the places in which people encounter each species. The resulting metrics of popularity and geographic specificity of interest allow us to define aspects of relationships between people and birds within a cultural niche space. We then estimate the influence of species traits and socially constructed labels on niche positions to assess the importance of observations and ideas in shaping public interest in birds.

Our analyses show clear effects of migratory strategy, color, degree of association with bird feeders, and, especially, body size on niche position. They also indicate that cultural labels, including “endangered,” “introduced,” and, especially, “team mascot,” are strongly associated with the magnitude and geographic specificity of public interest in birds. Our results provide a framework for exploring complex relationships between humans and other species and enable more informed decision-making across diverse bird conservation strategies and goals….(More)”.

New Data-Driven Map Shows Spread of Participation in Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Loren Peabody at the Participatory Budgeting Project: “As we celebrate the first 30 years of participatory budgeting (PB) in the world and the first 10 years of the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), we reflect on how far and wide PB has spread–and how it continues to grow! We’re thrilled to introduce a new tool to help us look back as we plan for the next 30+ years of PB. And so we’re introducing a map of PB across the U.S. and Canada. Each dot on the map represents a place where democracy has been deepened by bringing people together to decide together how to invest public resources in their community….

This data sheds light on larger questions, such as what is the relationship between the size of PB budgets and the number of people who participate? Looking at PBP data on processes in counties, cities, and urban districts, we find a positive correlation between the size of the PB budget per person and the number of people who take part in a PB vote (r=.22, n=245). In other words, where officials make a stronger commitment to funding PB, more people take part in the process–all the more reason to continue growing PB!….(More)”.