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Jun 1Liked by Pranay Kotasthane

The piece on the new theory of human behavior and how it can influence policies was excellent. Thank you! You summarized it perfectly with that 1-liner:

"Our starting assumption matters. A lot."

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author

thanks!

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May 27Liked by Pranay Kotasthane

Another brilliant framework on rationality vs irrationality.

When I started my reading and work on public policy, I started off on a paternalistic note - that people are irrational and thus government has to nudge people away from these irrational paths. This was also the time Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize in Economics and I was completely sold for it.

Eventually I started observing irrational things in my own behavior, but which I feel (obviously biased) are helping me. A simple example is my fondness for Tea. Despite a lot of research saying that plain Black Coffee has better health benefits over Tea, I was not able to force myself out of Tea. Tea boosts my mood and I feel great! I found it perfectly reasonable to continue with Tea.

Ever since I started reading/writing fiction, I am better able to appreciate reason over this rationality-irrationality dichotomy. In fiction, we deal with characters, not agents. And characters are often reasonable, taking decisions based on their contexts, information, hormones and emotional status. I think policy folks should get some training to write stories to be able to come up with more reasonable policies :)

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The AI article is well thought out and balanced... Good work!

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"Deli mutation"?

Is it spelling autocorrect of "delimitation"?

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