This Graphic Explains 20 Cognitive Biases That Affect Your Decision-Making. Big Think Interview With Richard Thaler. How to wake up feeling great: The 90 minute rule. RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Dan Ariely on 23andMe and the Burden of Knowledge - Scott Berinato. News broke Friday that 23andMe, the provider of genetic testing services built around a $99 kit you can use at home, would cease providing health information to consumers while the product underwent a Food and Drug Administration approval process, because the FDA considers the test a medical device that requires regulatory review.
While the FDA reviews the product, 23andMe will continue to provide customers ancestry data and raw data. Coincidentally, right when the news was posted, I was speaking with celebrated behavioral economist Dan Ariely about 23andMe. Ariely saw an ad for the kit and his curiosity prompted him to take the test. When he got the results, he knew he wanted to direct a researcher’s lens on it, because “this was standard, classic, even an exaggerated case of information overload. I wanted to analyze it from the point of view of what we can do with this information, and what should we do.
What was the reaction to the kits in the lab? It was more than that. No. A machine for jumping to conclusions. To Daniel Kahneman, PhD, the human mind is a marvel, but a fallible one. Kahneman, who is best known as the only psychologist to win a Nobel Prize (in economics), has spent decades investigating people's automatic thought processes. He has found that what he calls our "System 1"—our automatic, intuitive mind—usually lets us navigate the world easily and successfully. But, when unchecked by "System 2"—our controlled, deliberative, analytical mind—System 1 also leads us to make regular, predictable errors in judgment.
Considering those errors in the 1970s led Kahneman and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, PhD, who died in 1996, to develop the Nobel-prize-winning theory that explains why human beings often make economic decisions that aren't perfectly rational—in contrast to what economists had long believed.
Kahneman spoke to the Monitor about his new book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," which sums up his life's research on human judgments, decision-making and, most recently, happiness. The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society. Two bodyguards trotted behind Enrique Peñalosa, their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his profession – and his locale.
Peñalosa was a politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a reputation for kidnapping and assassination. What was unusual was this: Peñalosa didn't climb into the armoured SUV. Instead, he hopped on a mountain bike. His bodyguards and I pedalled madly behind, like a throng of teenagers in the wake of a rock star. A few years earlier, this ride would have been a radical and – in the opinion of many Bogotáns – suicidal act. I first saw the Mayor of Happiness work his rhetorical magic back in the spring of 2006. Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars.
In the third year of his term, Peñalosa challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment.