From the free ebook A Manifesto for Applying Behavioral Science from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team:

The other concern is that [behavorial science] theories can make specific predictions, but they are disconnected from each other – and from a deeper, general framework that can provide broader explanations (like evolutionary theory, for example). The main way this issue affects behavioral science is through heuristics and biases. Examples of individual biases are accessible, popular, and how many people first encounter behavioral science. These ideas are incredibly useful, but have often been presented as lists of standalone curiosities, in a way that is incoherent, reductive, and deadening. They can create overconfident thinking that targeting a specific bias (in isolation) will achieve a certain outcome.

Cognitive biases and mental models make for great blog posts but are really hard to put into practice as an individual or effectively guide policy as an organization.

For further reading, try Nudge (the new/final edition was just released in 2021).

// 08.28.23

From Tanner Greer’s The Scholar’s Stage:

The professionalization of intellectual pursuit is another problem. Melville would never have written Moby Dick if he had spent years enrolled in an MFA program instead of spending years at sea. Men and women who in past ages would have observed humanity up close (or at least who would have been forced through a broad but rigorous education in classics) instead cloister themselves in ivory towers. Their intellectual energy is channeled into ever more specialized academic fields and cautiously climbing a bureaucratic and over-managed academic ladder. Could that social scene ever produce a great work?

// 08.21.23