

Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior - mooreds
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/upshot/unless-you-are-spock-irrelevant-things-matter-in-economic-behavior.html

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klenwell
If you enjoyed this article, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking
Fast and Slow, in which Thaler and insights like the one highlighted in this
article feature prominently.

I also happened to stumble across this gem yesterday: Michael Lewis writing on
Kahneman and his influence on Moneyball, the book and the revolution:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/michael-
lewis-201112](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112)

I was impressed by Kahneman's humility, although not at all surprised after
reading the book.

One of these days, I'd like to start a discussion about Kahneman's
recommendations for doing interviews from Thinking Fast and Slow. Just waiting
for the right "Interviews are broken" thread, I guess.

Finally, in fairness to the article at hand, I should probably check out
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics when it comes out.

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te_platt
Maybe a better title would be "People have a funny sense of what is relevant."
That is, people have complicated ways of placing value on things. In the case
of scaling the test to 137 points so the average comes out closer to 100 is
silly in some ways it satisfies the students conditioning to thinking a 100 is
a great score. I find the example sad in several ways (Is the teacher testing
to material above what is being taught? Do the students care more about the
score than actually learning something? probably...) but wanting a 100 is not
irrelevant to the students.

I just bought a blue car. The color makes no difference in the performance of
the car. That doesn't mean it was irrelevant to me.

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RockyMcNuts
Just had a discussion of this article and book a few days ago on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557598)

