Frank Furedi at Sp!ked writes:
Advocates of nudging describe themselves as ‘choice architects’ and claim that their policies help people make the right choices. What they mean is that their aim is to construct a scenario where people make the kind of choices that our moral superiors believe to be right. The aim of behavioural-management techniques is to prevent, or at least discourage, people from making the ‘wrong’ choices. In effect, the implicit objective of these techniques is to deprive people of the capacity for making wrong choices. But if citizens are freed from the burden of distinguishing between right and wrong, then they cease to be choice-makers.
So are these choices wrong or not? He puts scare quotes around the word “wrong” in one sentence but later leaves them out. Anyway, the nudgers (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein) claim to be helping people make choices they themselves want to make but fail to for a variety of reasons relating to impulse control and cognitive bias. It’s incorrect to claim they are making choices they alone believe to be best for a public that disagrees with their prescriptions due to a base morality. This isn’t to say that in practice the difference may be null and void, but at least get their argument right.
Entitled to an Opinion 
January 23, 2011 at 12:16 am
A common libertarian complaint is that “libertarian paternalists” only advocate for more government intervention rather than less, revealing that those critics haven’t actually read what Sunstein/Thaler wrote.
Katja Grace seems to view an individual at separate times as being like distinct people, and libertarian logic can support preventing those at earlier times from harming those who come later.
It occurs to me that Eliezer Yudkowsky would be more sympathetic to finding ways to let our “higher reasoning” and the results of reflection (through Coherent Extrapolated Volition) override base impulses while Robin Hanson would not.
January 23, 2011 at 7:05 am
What a chaotic state of affairs.
I think it’s deeply misleading to attribute the notion of separate selves at different times to Katja Grace (though she does have her own cool epistemological innovations and popularizations).
I’ve had a fall off in neuroscience literacy so I can’t give a better name to attribute it too, but I think a category like “many neuroscientists” would be better.
Also, it’s fair to note there ARE people that explicity want to manipulate mass behavior (subpopulations and total populations) against their self-perceived interests -I’m one of them.
Of course threads like these are always a good place to point out that the absence of rules are default rules, and not-explicitly understood rules are also functional manipulations.
So, for example, advocating to remove a currently existing rule, like libertarians often do, is to advocate for a manipulation of behavior in a different direction -even if not explicitly.
Finally, the thought occured to me in an Yglesias comment threat. We hear terms like “big government” -we might as well use terms like “big freedom” and “big liberty” too, because of the massive effects expansions of those things can have on the lives of peon agents like ourselves.
January 23, 2011 at 3:29 pm
So, for example, advocating to remove a currently existing rule, like libertarians often do, is to advocate for a manipulation of behavior in a different direction -even if not explicitly.
The difference I’d say is that between moving things in a different direction vs. a specific direction. Libertarians want to increase the exit option, which is of course very likely to result in something different (though not always, some times people will behave as if regulations were still in place anyway), whereas non-libertarians want to decrease the ability to exit from the paths of action and behavior they are trying to encourage.
I’m in agreement that manipulation is omnipresent no matter what the arrangement of exit opportunities, but libertarians are in favor of not locking certain manipulative pressures into place via the state. This privileges avoiding explicit manipulation over the less explicit, true, but implied in that distinction is the uncertainty and relatively open ended (read “exit here?”) nature of the latter.
January 23, 2011 at 3:56 pm
If there’s a real distinction in your comment it lost me at first read.
I see libertarians as wanting to preserve the romance of liberty/freedom.
Other than that it seems to me to be posturing off of wherever technocrats end up (wait for us to settle someplace, and then posture as the guy that wants somewhat less government regulation than us).
January 26, 2011 at 11:51 pm
I remember the Daily Show had a segment on lobbyists where they used the phrase “Big Citizen”.
H.A’s description of libertarians doesn’t resemble my impression, but I may spend too much time reading first-principles anarcho-capitalists.
January 29, 2011 at 9:45 am
TGGP,
There’s no honest thing as a first-principle anarcho-capitalist, it seems to me. It’s people with psychologies and postures. Add some heat and you get activity.