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Cass Sunstein, blog leader

Junior Minister for 4Chan ?


Sunstein had, during his academic career, a penchant for publishing trial balloons -- they were a necessary part of his inquiry, a perpetual what if? Now, with their author a government official, some of these conjectures seem more worrisome. Sunstein has, for example, written often about the corrosive effects of rumors and falsehoods on democratic discourse (it is the subject of one of the two books that were published while he was waiting to be confirmed last year), and in a 2008 paper, he proposed that government agents "cognitively infiltrate" chat rooms and message boards to try to debunk conspiracy theories before they spread. The paper was narrowly concerned with terrorism, but to some, these were dark musings. The liberal essayist Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, called the proposal "spine-chilling."

MAGAZINE
Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us
By BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS
Published: May 11, 2010
President Obama's regulatory czar says that incentives, not top-down regulation, can make us do the right thing -- and that includes slowing climate change.

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