psychology

Breaking of Old Norms: After decades of disinflation, markets and policymakers developed a set of beliefs, tools, and expectations fitted to low and stable inflation. If a structural shift occurs, these old mental models no longer apply, making it harder to control or predict rising inflation.

o Behavioral and Market Sentiment Changes: As inflation

Kaczynski’s actions, though unforgivable, can teach us as much about gamification as his philosophy. His red herrings lured people away from what they actually sought, and, as we shall see, this is the greatest danger of gamification.

Respect is so important to humans that it’s a key reason we evolved to play games. Will Storr, in his book The Status Game , charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less

Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.

And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, b

Companies that exploit our gameplaying compulsion will have an edge over those who don’t, so every company that wishes to compete must gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game s

B. F. Skinner believed environment determines behavior, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviorism, mainly on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a cage with a food dispenser controlled by a sensor or button.

IV. Playing for Keeps

There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, and many of them are far older than our own. Statistically, this would suggest that by now our galaxy would be teeming with signs of advanced alien life. And yet space is silent. This discrepancy, known as the Fermi paradox, has puzzled scientists for almost a century. Ted

McConnell used Skinnerian techniques to create rehabilitation programs for prisoners and psychiatric patients, some of which were successful. But his most ambitious scheme emerged in the early Eighties, when he witnessed people being captivated by video games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, and realized their addictive mechanics could be translated t

Kaczynski had made lightly; he’d developed an entire philosophy to justify it. Influenced by techno-dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Jacques Ellul, Kaczynski believed the Industrial Revolution had turned society into a cold process of production and consumption that was gradually crushing everything humans valued most: freedom, happiness, p