{"id":37612,"date":"2013-07-31T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T12:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=37612"},"modified":"2013-07-30T12:51:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T17:51:18","slug":"those-cows-left-the-barn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=37612","title":{"rendered":"Those Cows Left The Barn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I expect conservatives and libertarians to be exercised over the news that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/2013\/07\/30\/govt-knows-best-white-house-creates-nudge-squad-to-shape-behavior\/\">the White House is establishing a &#8220;Nudge Squad&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; a group of behavioral scientists who will work with the government bureaucracy to try to help shape citizen behavior:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,&#8221; reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.<\/p>\n<p>The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would &#8220;experiment&#8221; with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.<\/p>\n<p>The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a &#8220;Behavioral Insights Team.&#8221; One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>On the one hand, it all sounds very Orwellian.\u00a0 And it is; using the government to shape peoples&#8217; behavior is a short and utterly undefineable step away from using it to shape peoples&#8217; thought.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand?\u00a0 Precisely what has the public education system been since its inception?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I expect conservatives and libertarians to be exercised over the news that the White House is establishing a &#8220;Nudge Squad&#8221; &#8211; a group of behavioral scientists who will work with the government bureaucracy to try to help shape citizen behavior: &#8220;Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,122,51,69,255,73,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-oh-the-humanity","category-liberal-tyranny","category-socialism","category-the-racket","category-western-civilization","category-your-papers-please"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37613,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37612\/revisions\/37613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}