Too Much Information Understanding What You Dont Want to Know

Book Reviews

Cass R. Sunstein. As well Much Information: Agreement What You Don't Want to Know. Cambridge, MA: MIT Printing, 2020. 264p. Hardcover, $27.95 (ISBN 978-0-2620-4416-5).

When should the government require data disclosure? Cass Sunstein attempts to answer this past offering a framework in his latest volume, As well Much Information: Understanding What You lot Don't Desire to Know.

Sunstein assigns a moral equally well as economical value to choices around disclosure: a salad is "meliorate" than a cheeseburger, but y'all'll enjoy your meal less. While he suggests personalized disclosures throughout the book, this view of what information has inherent value shapes how his questions are developed and the framework that forms his argument. Many of his conclusions are based on a study conducted in Mechanical Turk, Amazon's gig economy platform for tasks requiring human intelligence.

This is an interesting methodological conclusion. Sunstein notes of the survey results, "Amazingly, merely 54 percent wanted to know how the stock market will be doing on a specified date in the futurity. (Plain people did not think, as they should: If I receive that information, I tin can make substantially all the money I desire.)" For many of the Mechanical Turk workers plugging away at hundreds of survey questions a day, information about the stock marketplace isn't relevant because it's the sort of unactionable information Sunstein would call boring mental ataxia. Instead of considering the enormous barriers to creating a stock market portfolio for someone who needs gig economic system work to live, he is astonished.1 The references for this assay clarify that his survey was non representative but that he'south engaged with a national-level survey that volition be. Presumably this also volition utilize Mechanical Turk, where the value of a representative sample is explicitly communicated. An MT worker with a graduate caste costs more than per tasks than a loftier schoolhouse graduate.2

Sunstein does this again while citing a study on prospective payday loan borrowers: information technology's unreasonable to compare the APR of credit card debt, car loans, or mortgages even though they have far better terms than a payday loan. The study, "Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases and Payday Borrowing" (Bertrand and Morse, 2010), acknowledges the circumstances that bulldoze payday loans oftentimes mean consumers are already acting in their best interests: they've picked the best bad option. Sunstein omits this from his narrative and, like the stock market example, doesn't acknowledge that, while the information is useful, it isn't actionable. This is because Besides Much Data isn't written so people entrenched in systemic crisis tin can understand marketing, regulation, and disclosure, or brand "better" choices. It's written for people who believe those choices be.

Sunstein gets a number of things right: information has a cost. Disclosures have positive and negative outcomes. Throughout the volume Sunstein offers what should be examples of actionable information outside the context of American life, but doesn't move forward into the infinite where his background every bit a regulator could be powerful: does requiring nutritional information on fast nutrient menus matter in nutrient deserts or to people facing enormous systemic inequalities? The text repeatedly misses how data disclosure functions in larger social contexts, which is odd because Sunstein'southward bookish work doesn't. His 2014 article, "Disclosure: Psychology Changes Everything," which he repackages throughout Likewise Much Information, does inquire for more qualitative research. It's a shame there's no acknowledgment of any research published since so most income and fast food consumption. The Centers for Affliction Command's recent findings bear witness higher income ways more fast food consumption, not less.three Or, the enquiry done on the federal government'due south programs to incentivize development of fast nutrient chains in Black neighborhoods since the 1960s. None of this is here. There's no single gap that ruins an otherwise engaging text with an interesting premise, though the chapter on Facebook suffers because it lacks any investigation into disclosures in the context of social media, and the book would be stronger with information technology cut. Information technology's the total of these omissions resting on underbaked methodology inviting uncertainty.

Someone with Sunstein'southward enormous reach could practise good in this moment, erase the vivid moment of a friend'south claim that he'd "ruined popcorn" equally a event of his work in the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama. As well Much Information suffers because information technology's deeply invested in a mechanized solution. Enough nudging, suggestion through design, and unsubtle architectures and we can ameliorate our lives.

Sunstein's choice compages (a concept from his earlier work, Nudge) makes no mention of the designer of those choices, and how consumer responses to disclosures most everything from safety regulations to nutritional data, to privacy policies and ingredients lists are influenced by factors that cannot be assessed by asking how much someone will pay for information.

In a book full of interesting choices, where Sunstein chooses to become further into disciplinary weeds and when he avoids it becomes a tell. Although he explains that each chapter is a substantial revision of previous work, I am skeptical this happened in a useful way. An anecdote about a chat with President Obama is reduced to "the President might've said a naughty word!"

His discussion of sludge brings similar frustration. Sludge is taxing, drains energy, and creates barriers. Reducing annoying paperwork is practiced. I have a recurring nightmare where I'm making a educatee loan payment with a paper check inside a DMV with jaundiced lighting and walls. Sunstein correctly notes that women do the majority of authoritative tasks and "sludge" work of running a household and raising children, only he concludes eliminating sludge might address the issue. He does not suggest men acquire to perform a more equitable share of these tasks.

He goes on to discuss gender disparities and workplace promotions, where Sunstein concludes, "Evidently men are more willing than women to put themselves forward and hence to navigate some sludge. When sludge is removed, disparities between men and women are essentially eliminated." But housework isn't valued in real economic terms, and the literature about consequences for women who don't perform niceness or requite "correct" reasons for their ambition at piece of work is well established.4

There are proficient ideas here: default voter registration, confirmation buttons when you want to delete things. It's the absence of engagement with night patterns, or deeper investigation into the user feel of data disclosure, that keep this piece of work from striking its potential. The result of nudges, sludge, and determining what data is also much is a vast, invasive surveillance apparatus, designed in the proper noun of bettering the lives of others while imposing a singular, paternalistic vision of the improved life. The problem is non that the government is bad at regulation through nudging, just that forces more than powerful than Sunstein imagines through this book are at work in the lives of everyone. Who nudges the nudgers is not what Sunstein wants to confront, though he comes closer with each iteration of this series of ideas.—Scarlet Galvan, Grand Valley Land University

Notes

1. Aaron Smith, "Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing," Pew Research Center 17 (2016).

2. Run into pricing by worker attributes at: https://requester.mturk.com/pricing.

3. Cheryl D. Fryar et al., "Fast Food Consumption amongst Adults in the United States, 2013–2016," NCHS Data Brief No. 322 (Oct 2018), https://world wide web.cdc.gov/nchs/information/databriefs/db322-h.pdf.

4. H.R. Bowles, L. Babcock, and 50. Lai, "Social Incentives for Gender Differences in the Propensity to Initiate Negotiations: Sometimes It Does Hurt to Enquire," Organizational Behavior and Homo Decision Processes 103, no. 1 (2007): 84–103.

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Source: https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/24838/32675

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