[sciborg2]

Not so foolish: We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?

    And in The Righteous Mind (2012), the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is ‘our most noble attribute’ a mere ‘delusion’. The worship of reason, he adds, ‘is an example of faith in something that does not exist’. Your brain, runs the now-prevailing wisdom, is mainly a tangled, damp and contingently cobbled-together knot of cognitive biases and fear.
   
This is a scientised version of original sin.

And its eager adoption by today’s governments threatens social consequences that many might find troubling. A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.

Further objections arise as nudging techniques are increasingly allied with the surveillance capabilities of personal technology – for instance, smart cards that offer discounts on local taxes if citizens use them to go to the gym regularly. This might make it easier to blame individuals for their own poor health, or to increase their insurance premiums, because of their demonstrable and recorded bad behaviour. (‘For what else could possibly explain their health problems but their personal failings?’, the critic Evgeny Morozov asks sardonically. ‘It’s certainly not the power of food companies or class-based differences or various political and economic injustices.’) If refusing a nudge carries a financial or other penalty, how free does the nudged choice remain?

[Kellais]

Heh, funnily enough i thought about a very similar topic this afternoon.

I do think that the rationality of a lot of people is overrated. I certainly think though, that there are some pretty reasonable folks out there. Although maybe that's just my delusion, eh ?!

Again, the problem with that line of thinking is that it skirts, for my taste, too close to the BS "all is relative" notion. Or let's put it that way: If you let some parts of society stew too long with that idea in the front (that "being rational" is all BS / everything is relative), they jump to very unhealthy conclusions.
Just as unhealthy, imo, as those opinions that want to regulate society with more "logic" or, as above, with reason/rationality.
I just think, to take up the example of the last quoted paragraph, that there are some consumer-habits that should be penalized in our health-care system (especially in insurance costs). The "laissez faire"-attitude of our western culture has gone to ridiculous extrems and i think it is not ok that the community needs to pay for that.
So i guess i disagree with the general sentiment of the last quote. It is the individual AND the companies that are at fault. Just blaming it all on the evil companies is as wrong as blaming it all on the individual.

[sciborg2]

It is an interesting problem - moral relativity doesn't seem to lead to a good end game, and neither does the idea of using science to direct us toward "real" morality.

On the consumer vs company, it reminds me of the crash of the US Stockmarket in 2008. That was a combination of irrational house flippers and Wall Street ignoring their own risk management departments. I think humans have the capacity for rationality, but they also seem to be tempted toward irrational actions rather easily.