On Nudging And Recursion
One of the interesting things about keeping a diary—especially electronic diaries—is that you can compile a lot of information. I've been keeping an Evernote diary since 2009. In the beginning, I just saved articles to it to read later, and now it's become encyclopedic in some ways. It's my personal internet. A while back I was thinking about nudges. (There was a book that came out in 2013 by Cass Sunstein titled Nudge ). I had a note in my diary about doing a piece on it and then I ran a search in Evernote and I have articles going back to 2010 talking about nudging—especially nudging with technology using notifications and algorithms. What's remarkable about digital text is that you can amass a lot of it and you can go back and do searches and then collect that information and shape it again in a recursive process, which is interesting because our minds are naturally recursive in some ways—continually connecting to something else—winnowing it down—-a narrowing. Last
