http://bigbangbong.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/351/ Wanton rendezvous of hovering souls Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:41:26 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://bigbangbong.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/351/#comment-7006 sadakalo Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:37:37 +0000 http://bigbangbong.wordpress.com/?p=351#comment-7006 After reading about "Predictably.." in this blog I found the book and read it up. Amazing book. It helps one understand the world, and more importantly, his ownself. Many times I paused reading and thought in ashtonishment, "Okay! so this is why I did what I did." Thanks to this blog for introducing the book to it's readers (hope this encourages the bloggers to post again, they haven't posted anything for a long time). There are two issues regarding the book though. The first is ethical. In a number of experiments the participants were given incomplete or misleading information about the experiment. What about the system of 'informed consent'? Dan Arieli himself has mentioned about the ethical issue while talking about placebo, but that his personal conflict. It would be interesting to know the official standpoint of an institute like MIT where most of his experiments were conducted. The second issue is that of a sampling error. Arieli has performed his novel experiments with a very small sample size, mostly a handful of young MIT scholars, and yet he tries to generalise his results, imposing them over the whole human race. A researcher of his stature should have refrained from this sensationalism. Any way, the book is extremely well written and a good introduction to behavioural economics. After reading about “Predictably..” in this blog I found the book and read it up. Amazing book. It helps one understand the world, and more importantly, his ownself. Many times I paused reading and thought in ashtonishment, “Okay! so this is why I did what I did.” Thanks to this blog for introducing the book to it’s readers (hope this encourages the bloggers to post again, they haven’t posted anything for a long time).
There are two issues regarding the book though. The first is ethical. In a number of experiments the participants were given incomplete or misleading information about the experiment. What about the system of ‘informed consent’? Dan Arieli himself has mentioned about the ethical issue while talking about placebo, but that his personal conflict. It would be interesting to know the official standpoint of an institute like MIT where most of his experiments were conducted.
The second issue is that of a sampling error. Arieli has performed his novel experiments with a very small sample size, mostly a handful of young MIT scholars, and yet he tries to generalise his results, imposing them over the whole human race. A researcher of his stature should have refrained from this sensationalism.
Any way, the book is extremely well written and a good introduction to behavioural economics.

]]> http://bigbangbong.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/351/#comment-6922 Predictably Irrational « acc3ss.info Sun, 31 May 2009 10:09:06 +0000 http://bigbangbong.wordpress.com/?p=351#comment-6922 [...] See the original post: Predictably Irrational [...] [...] See the original post: Predictably Irrational [...]

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