Name: "Sludge": How bureaucracies abuse your time | Cass Sunstein for Big Think
Uploaded: 2022-07-26T18:27:05.000Z
Duration: 6 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When there's waiting time, paperwork requirements,

some confusing process that you can't navigate-

It's like a kind of gooey, viscous substance

in which your feet are stuck and you can't get out.

If you're dealing with a criminal justice system

but if you're dealing with a hospital or your employer,

The question is: What are we gonna do about it?

Sludge reduction can produce big dividends.

that people aren't reckless or impulsive.

For example, if you need to get a driver's license

to make sure that those who are trying to get something

Sludge is bad when it makes navigation really hard

and something that can make their life much better.

So it might be that in order to get a loan

And each of the pages might have really small font.

And we might, three pages in, give up and think,

"I can't handle this", or "I'll handle this tomorrow."

And you might find in a hospital, for example,

Our lives depend on our capacity to navigate something,

we're lost in a world of just fog and diminishment.

One of the less lovely facts of the last decades

is that we now know more than we ever did

But if you have a company that wants to make money

at people's expense, it can use sludge strategically

'Dark patterns' are patterns of architecture online

that end up exploiting people's lack of information

without fully knowing what they're getting into.

So for many of us unsubscribing to something is an ordeal.

And that's intended by the people who make it an ordeal

in order to make it hard for us to unsubscribe.

because I didn't want to navigate the sludge

that was entailed in the unsubscribing to those products.

It's also the case that you can use sludge

that you're obliging people contractually to agree to.

It's time to recognize, right, not to be manipulated,

and often the method by which people are manipulated

is through the selective imposition of sludge.

Some of the most admirable designers of programs or cities

but to what human beings are actually like-

and often with a kind of humor and delight.

and never exploiting people's human foibles

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"Sludge": How bureaucracies abuse your time | Cass Sunstein for Big Think

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