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Also robustness costs, -- many heuristics that get poked at by champions of behavioral economics are behaviors that tend to give improved results when reasoning with noisy inputs (and, in particular, inputs with unknown levels of noise or even malicious distortions) compared to a formal decision theory that doesn't handle low quality inputs well.

These limitations are only a concern when people attempt to suggest that behavioral economics is telling us to rework how we live our lives. Generally such claims are unjustified extrapolations from very basic studies which in no way support the pop-economics advice. Like if someone did some experiments and determined that submersing people in water often killed the test subjects, then other people ran to the presses recommending that no one drink anymore because water was proven to kill in scientific studies... :)




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