Not so foolish

“Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors.” And so we exploit these hard-wired errors to nudge people into making the right choices. But Steven Poole claims there are ethical questions about nudging if only because “there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable.”

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