• 3 Posts
  • 495 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I will look for that episode. Thank you.

    I maintain that Nudge not being proven doesn’t change much in this situation, because as long as enough of “the right” people believe it has enough of an effect, they’ll continue to try. All it takes is one well-placed person who makes the tipping screen enabled by default for a popular payment collection service and/or adds resistance to changing that setting. Dark patterns spread easily, even when they don’t work. Even when they result in blowback.



  • I see that now. Thanks.

    It looks like we have a plausible mechanism and no evidence yet. I wonder who is trying to gather more evidence. My money is on nudging having nontrivial effect, but I might sleep better if I knew it didn’t. Either way, people will try, and that’s where we are.

    In that case, we fall back to the impact. All the more reason to advise folks to resist tipping unless they actually want to—to interpret the requests for tips in unexpected places as little more than an optimistic, misguided, or even accidental attempt to nudge. It’s the judgmental stories that people tell themselves that seem to tie them up in knots. Let others judge you for not tipping, because they were going to find some way to judge you, anyway.

    We can practise resisting. I recommend trying.



  • No no no. The burden of proof is on you to show that people are actually tipping more.

    I see. So I can understand your original reply as something in the neighborhood of “I don’t believe that people are tipping more”? rather than a denial of Nudge theory?

    Indeed, I don’t have evidence. Let me withdraw any claim that people are tipping more, not only because I can’t support it with data, but also because that’s irrelevant to my point.

    Nudge Theory is about nudging people by changing the choice of least resistance. The dark side of that is presenting people with an option to tip in a situation where they can be judged for refusing. Whether they actually tip more or not, this is literally taxing on the nervous system and is just another way of using bugs in the human brain against humans. It is presenting another resentment-stirring obstacle in their path.

    In addition, and somewhat beside the point, I’d be shocked if people weren’t actually tipping in those situations. Worse, and more troubling, I’d be shocked if they weren’t consequently tipping less to wait staff who truly need it and were being tipped more before this trend started happening. I have no evidence, but I see a clear and plausible mechanism.

    That’s it.







  • Women being intimate openly remains more socially acceptable than men doing it, at least presumed heterosexual men.

    I have noticed a shift in the last five years and more of the (heterosexual) men in my social circles have openly hugged me more enthusiastically than they used to.

    I have become more comfortable being affectionate in public in general, but that’s about becoming more comfortable with myself, rather than a matter of what’s assumed to be socially acceptable of the various genders. I’m definitely falling into the category of life’s too short and I’ll be dead sooner than I’d like to admit, so here I am, motherfuckers. Deal with it.