3min chapter

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish cover image

#47 Adam Robinson: Winning at the Great Game (Part 1)

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

CHAPTER

I Don't Think I'm Going to Pass the Test.

The average student in Yesansa's programme started with a score of 29. To get into stuyvesant, you needed to be 85 and the other two high schools were 75 and 65. In sane, we got two thirds of our students above 65. E, so in one of the three hischols, which was a huge improvement. So those numbers were, were startling. The improvements. They improved twice as much as the next let's grop i'm not talking about one % versus half %. I mean, they were incredible leaps. And it had to do with the father born in another country. Incidentally, and this is important, a improvement was inversely related

00:00
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It
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was three unlined pages, and i got to the end and clicked finish. And i
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sent an email to the person who had been pestering me to fill out the damned form and
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said, i'm done. Nd
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the next day, i get an email from her saying, no, you're not done, isy.
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What do you meansays, well,
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actually, when you click finish, you have to then go back to the first page and press submit. Now to me, finish kind of means you're done. So this version is not evil. This is just pure incompetence. Now,
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how much of this do you attribute to what you economists call the principal agent problem, that the people who are making the decision or the rule or whatever, are not the ones who would benefit or be hurt by it? I
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am not sure. I think the much bigger problem
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is what we call curse of knowledge, which
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is the idea that once u o know something, it's hard for you to put yourself into the position of someone who doesn't. It's hard to explain. And people who write code, first
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of all, are doing it on the next generation computers super fast,
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and
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they know how everything works. The
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home mortgage market, as you write nudge, is highly decentralized and competitive. And therefore, if one reads what economists generally say about centralization and competition, you'd think that there'd be incentive to make mortgage information transparent and user friendly. But as anyone who's ever gotten a mortgage knows, the process is not transparent and user friend so this is a case where there's tons of sludge. A lot of people make poor decisions. Why has a decentralized and competitive market not solved a problem like that? I mean, the synic in me just says, the lobby is better than the regulators.

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