The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies and techniques that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves. Here, we begin to look at systems of persuasion and manipulation known to psychologists and decision scientists that may have positive uses as well.

A few nights ago I was asked to appear on a news network long after dark, and I drove about half an hour to a studio near where I was staying. I’ve been doing these sorts of appearances for a few years, either as…

A Nobel Prizewinner Working to Save All Us Suckers

When I first met Richard Thaler, he quoted Homer. Not the philosopher, the Simpson character. Thaler was looking for a simple way to communicate the nature of human errors as he, an economist, had studied them, and in a single episode of the Simpsons he’d discovered his rosetta stone.

Homer, during a routine checkup, is found to have a nail embedded in his brain, and the helpful doctors remove it. Suddenly, he’s smart. He’s walking around in a sweater vest, making intelligent observations about his astonished and increasingly irritated friends until…

The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves.

Back in August a Twitter user, “Conspirador Norteño,” began documenting an interesting pattern among certain folks posting alt-right messages. Here’s one user that fit the pattern.

Conspirador Norteño picked one user, DavidJo52951945, from this group — one of more than 60,000 in a network of similar users.

DavidJo52951945 went on a daily tear, writing over the years about Brexit, about Ukraine, about Hillary Clinton—whatever was going on in…

The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves.

The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves.

I once sat inside a flight simulator, slowly blacking out.

“Flight simulator” doesn’t do the machine justice, but those are exactly the right words. There are the software simulators, which show you the ride. And there are the physical simulators which bump you around on a small crane. This wasn’t like that. This was the whole experience, and I was about to wash out.

I was in a windowless white capsule roughly large enough to represent the space inside a fighter jet. The capsule was attached on its right side to an enormous joint that could rotate it in any…

The series “Guidance Systems” discusses technologies that seem to improve our lives by offering us new choices, while in fact shaping or removing our ability to decide things for ourselves.

At the age of 14, Sean David imagined becoming a doctor. “I wanted to be Marcus Welby,” he remembers. So in the year after graduating college, he began to work in a hospital any way he could. He became an orderly, scrubbing out surgical theaters after each procedure.

“You go in, you pick up all the biological waste and dispose of it. You put this sudsy soap on the floor…