Reddit mentions of Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making

I wrote a quick script to search the full text of HPMOR and return everything italicized and in title case, which I think got most of the books mentioned in the text:

Book title|Author|Mentioned in chapter(s)|Links|Notes

---|:---|:---|:---|:---
Encyclopaedia Britannica| |7|Wikipedia|Encyclopaedia
Financial Times| |7|Wikipedia|Newspaper
The Feynman Lectures on Physics|Richard P. Feynman|8|Wikipedia|Full text is available online here
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases|Amos Tversky|8|Amazon|
Language in Thought and Action|S.I. Hayakawa|8|Amazon Wikipedia |
Influence: Science and Practice|Robert B. Cialdini|8|Wikipedia|Textbook. See also Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making|Reid Hastie and Robyn Dawes|8|Amazon |Textbook
Godel, Escher, Bach|Douglas Hofstadter|8, 22|Amazon Wikipedia|
A Step Farther Out|Jerry Pournelle|8|Amazon|
The Lord of the Rings|J.R.R. Tolkien|17|Wikipedia|
Atlas Shrugged|Ayn Rand|20, 98|Wikipedia|
Chimpanzee Politics|Frans de Waal|24|Amazon|
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality|Lewis Carroll Epstein|35, 102|Amazon|
Second Foundation|Isaac Asimov|86|Wikipedia|Third novel in the Foundation Series
Childcraft: A Guide For Parents| |91|Amazon|Not useful if your child has a mysterious dark side

Also, this probably isn't technically what the OP was asking, but since the script returned fictional titles along with real ones, I went ahead and included them too:

Book title|Mentioned in chapter(s)

---|:---
The Quibbler|6, 27, 38, 63, 72, 86
Hogwarts: A History|8, 73, 79
Modern Magical History|8
Magical Theory|16
Intermediate Potion Making|17
Occlumency: The Hidden Arte|21
Daily Prophet|22, 25, 26, 27, 35, 38, 53, 69, 77, 84, 86, 108
Magical Mnemonics|29
The Skeptical Wizard|29
Vegetable Cunning|48
Beauxbatons: A History|63
Moste Potente Potions|78
Toronto Magical Tribune|86
New Zealand Spellcrafter's Diurnal Notice|86
American Mage|86

As others mentioned, TVTropes has a virtually-exhaustive list of allusions to other works, which includes books that aren't explicitly named in the text, like Ender's Game

Here are some thoughts.

> Whether you wish to believe it or not, I sincerely believe that there are a large number of people in the US and the world that are exploitable at their very being.

Ok. What is your evidence? By this, I'm not asking for generalizations or statements of "large numbers of people believe this ridiculous thing, or fell for that silly scam." I mean evidence.

I'll help you out here. There's actually shit loads of evidence out there that the vast, vast majority of people are not any good at all at making rational decisions.

In their excellent book, "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World," authors Reid Hastie and Robyn Dawes draw upon decades worth of research. Said research has demonstrated, time and time again, that people "are not just irrational, but irrational in systematic ways (emphasis is the authors')--ways related to their automatic or bounded thinking habits."

As it turns out, you may actually be going a little easy on folks. It's not just "large numbers" of peons who suck at making rational decisions--it's most people, in general. It's a function of our biology.

> Because of this, the government needs to be there so that these individuals aren't exploited to the extent of tear-jerking poverty and maltreatment.

Now, this is where I would argue that you are quite off.

Who makes up "government," but people--other humans--who are just as likely to make erroneous judgments as anyone else?

One of the more interesting things that research in the field shows is that so-called experts are not particularly good at making decisions, either. In fact, simple linear models tend to be better at predicting outcomes than experts--in the experts' own fields! Look at research by Tversky and Kahneman or by Robert Libby for some examples.

Beyond that, significant research has shown that collective decision-making tends to be quite poor. There is a "lowest common denominator" effect which has shown to literally reduce effective IQs when working as a group!

So, here you have government, which is made of humans who are just as fallible as any other humans, who were elected via human popular (group-based) votes, and who operate in groups. One should not expect good laws and regulations to come from such a set-up.

TL;DR. You are correct in that people will often make irrational decisions, but you seem to be giving those who work in government the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it.

Hey! Nice summary - I also find this type of stuff very interesting. If you haven't read it yet I highly recommend Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. It goes through a whole bunch more of these effects I had never heard of and goes through some of the more formal basics of Decision Theory and such.