a_simm

email sent

It looks interesting, I'd be interested in finding out more about your business plan.

I sent an email

We had the exact same issue. Turns out cycling (all) the keys stopped it immediately. This was after looking through docs and many emails with stripe that never mentioned this as a solution.

I defend and elucidate. Worthlessness I would define here relative to the amounts of public and of policy attention the nudge findings have received vs net value add modified by these results.

Perhaps due to the PR efforts of leading researchers, it was much more than “set defaults intelligently.” The interpretations were more like: we can use social science to shape peoples’ behavior at the margins. Further these marginal changes would cumulate to substantive and lasting societal improvement.

On reflection, it seems to me that the value of this paper stems from its attempt to measure or quantify publication bias. In this case, the bias was positive in the direction of with studies confirming nudge effects.

Taking that a step further implies that the actual net nudge effects across published and unpublished studies were statistically and therefore substantively insignificant. Hence the use of the term worthless, i.e. non-findings.

To say that it is costless to implement a nudge scheme in the behavioral economics sense is simply untrue. In the retirement case it required a lengthy ethical and legal debate; some study and political argument as to the best outcome, which is in part a redistributive question, hard costs associated with revision or development of messages and other materials, etc.

Worse I believe is the damage done from attention and action predicated on now seemingly faulty social science. What could’ve been done instead and what will happen in the next time a social scientist claims an ‘easy’ way to make things better are costs.

Wow. As a former social scientist with an axe to grind this hits hard.

I like to provide that HN community with some context as to what this means.

There are some 300 “research” departments in each of the major social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology. If you believe what they say, about half of their mission is teaching and the other half is research. That’s a lot, tens of billions of dollars.

The nudge findings were among the few to not only reach the level of public knowledge but, more importantly, directly influence on public policy. To use the one I most familiar with: the so called default for defined contribution retirement plans, eg 401k. These government regs assumed, for good reason, that maximizing contributions was in the public interest. Based on the nudge findings, after much debate and effort, they were updated to dictate that the max options forms was pre selected in the brief it would cause more individuals would opt for that as opposed to contributing zero.

So far so good, right? In fact nudge has become a canonical example in introductory public policy courses as to how their research can in some sense make things better.

This meta-analytic finding turns on the authors’ method for measuring publication bias. Because I accept that, I must believe that this entire body of research, probably the signal behavioral economics work, is essentially worthless! Thus, all that effort has not only been wasted but the credibility of social science in general is damaged.

Adding this to the well/known gamesmanship in peer review, debate over tenure and etc. means it’s past time to reform a large chunk of academia.

Definitely is a societal problem; to me that means we need a societal solution.

Namely individuals have to call out bad behavior to the point it’s regulated. Not so much in this case by the market but by government regulation to hold two sided marketplaces accountable for almost literal fraud by one party.

In this case it’s easier as more a legal question as opposed to a skill question.

I would penalize Upwork for the wage differential times three. Notice Upwork would be responsible, not the other side.

It should also be easy for the ”wronged” side of this transaction to pursue such a claim.

The non-irony here is the tremendous amount of effort, ie periodic screenshots, logs etc. that make sure Upwork gets paid.

Just wanted chime in with second a second anecdote that I was going to post.

We needed a Django developer. Put an ad on Upwork at the high end of the recommended salary range. The ad specified US Eligible worker for legal reasons.

Of the 10 or so applicants, seven flat out refused to appear on webcam so I decided to talk to the eighth.

This person claim to be in Seattle. Having lived there I asked them two relatively simple questions. First, can you see the space needle from where you’re sitting? Answer: Yes.

Second, what color is the bubbly music museum next door? Obviously, this is a trick given it’s multicolored. My candidate, who did not lack bravado, guesses white.

I get that being born into particular circumstances is luck of the draw. On the other hand there’s a reason that people are willing to pay more to hire US-based workers.

I believe this has become a general societal problem. People running so called two-sided marketplaces regularly fail to take responsibility for gaming by one side. I would further argue that Upwork has even more responsibility given the monitoring of and commission they take from an ongoing relationship.

The US probably has too many regulations - in my opinion - concerning immigrant workers; however, no temp agency could get away with what Upwork is doing without facing severe repercussions.

I’d like to see Upwork punished.

Yes I'm sure. They were made with Windows (probably XP) software and works something like Apple's Time Machine. So if your put in the first cd it will give you an option -- assuming it was the same device apparently -- to overwrite your hard disk to exactly the same state as it was when the recover/ restore / backup - not sure what to call it - was made, including user files. The problem here is that it seems to be locked to the original device or model (can't figure out wich) so it won't start the recovery process.

The backup was created using the included windows software at the time. The computer I bought is pretty useless

Given the volume of the data and previous experience, the disks would restore the computer into the same state as when the were created, including all the user files at the time.

Its a copy of all the files on the computer at the time: letters, photos and anything else she was working on or we sent her.