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If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says. They would be the most margin-friendly way to deliver calories. But the food still wouldn’t be good—because the original metric didn’t take into account “sustainability, or health, or nourishment, or happiness of the people.”

Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites. (No wonder they make 85 cents of every digital-ad dollar.

The first problem is that social media tends to get only a certain kind of idea down.

These platforms are conversational which makes us overly concerned with publishing interesting stuff.

But here’s the problem — I’m embedded within a pretty advanced group of people in educational technology. Ideas that we think are common might be revolutionary for others. But we’ll never produce posts or tweets about them because everyone in our clan already knows them.

And the stuff that we do produce assumes you share our background, so it’s not always readable outside our clan.

But for a nontrivial set of things if information is going to useful to the circles it moves to it is going to need to be recontextualized and reframed.

different technologies excel at different stages.

federated wiki which allows the sort of communal wiki experience, but also supports those earlier stages of the knowledge life cycle.

You’re looking for a system that produces what Polanyi called “spontaneous order”.

Minority voices are squelched, flame wars abound. We spend hours at a time as rats hitting the Skinner-esque levers of Twitter and Tumblr, hoping for new treats — and this might be OK if we actually then built off these things, but we don’t. We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop that doesn’t allow us silent spaces to reflect on issues without news pegs, and in which many of our areas of collaboration have become toxic, or worse, a toxic bureaucracy. We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop where we react to the reactions of reactions (while fearing further reactions), and then we wonder why we’re stuck with groupthink and ideological gridlock.

Researchers have used a series of text messages like this one to "nudge" students to complete important tasks like filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The researchers, Ben Castleman and

He says there are two aspects of behavioral work: trying to solve a behavioral problem, and doing so with a behavioral solution.

Social psychologists are interested in how people make sense of an experience, which can in turn direct their behavior.

"We begin a step back in the causal process," Mr. Walton says. As a result, social psychology’s interventions often strive to change how students see the social world around them, or actually change that world — for instance, by having teachers frame their feedback differently.

The approach is elegant, creative, and aligned with common sense.

It’s possible some people would argue that we act like completely rational beings, but probably not anyone who spends a lot of time around college students.

Given their low cost, behavioral solutions often appealing to funders and policy makers.

But the flip side of the coin is that such low-cost solutions cannot replace other, pricier efforts to improve college access and success.

Higher education presents a "perfect storm for the frailties of human reasoning," Mr. Kelly says. "The system often seems set up to frustrate people."

Critics of efforts to simplify or inform students’ choices often say that college isn’t meant to be easy. If someone cannot successfully apply for financial aid, maybe that person doesn’t belong in college. Researchers typically respond by saying they are working to help students through the pesky tasks on the periphery of going to college. Filing the Fafsa — which, incidentally, the most advantaged students don’t have to deal with — isn’t meant to be an admissions test.