Fighting Akrasia: Finding the Source

How to fight akrasia" becomes "how to align actual preferences and believed preferences" and you're no closer to a solution.

On the contrary, you're one step closer, in that you can now begin asking what your actual preferences are, and how to get them all met.

(Note that your "believed" preferences are also preferences; they just don't necessarily have the same practical weight as whatever other preferences are interfering with them. The issue isn't real vs. believed, it's preference A vs. preference B, and resolving any perceived conflicts, by thinking through and discarding the cached thoughts built up around them.)

This observation doesn't seem to undermine the "wrong about what we want" view.

Suppose that your decisions are (imperfectly) optimized for A but you believe that you want B, and hence consciously optimize for B.

When considering a complex procedure which would get you a bunch of A next week, you reason "I want B, so why would I do something that gets me a bunch of A?" and don't do it. You would only pursue such a complex procedure if you believed that you wanted A.

By contrast, given a simple way to get A you could do it without believing that you want to do it. So you do (after all, your decisions are optimized for A), but then believe that you have done something other than what you wanted to do.

Under these conditions it would be possible to get more of both A and B, by pursuing the efficient-but-delayed path to getting A and not pursuing the inefficient-but-immediate path. But in order to do that you would have to believe that you ought to.

That is to say, the question need not be "how to align actual preferences and believed preferences," it could be "how do we organize a mutually beneficial trade?"

Of course there are other problems---for example, we aren't very well optimized for A, and in particular aren't great at looking far into the future. This seems very important, but I think that rationalists tend to significantly underestimate how well optimized we are for A (in part because we take at face value our beliefs about what we want, and observe that we are very poorly optimized for getting that).

Although starting to smoke is a total moron thing to do, there may be less irrationality present in pursuing an existing addiction than commonly believed. Someone who craves nicotine has the choice of attempting to ignore the craving, which has all kinds of bad, immediate consequences (irritability, distraction, twitchiness, insomnia, flu symptoms, sore mouth, sore throat, cough, headache, intestinal protestations, etc.) until you keep it up for a good long time, or giving into it, which has (per cigarette) very small and distant negative consequences (tiny increase in risk of assorted diseases which might kill you or not).

It's possible I'm only defending this because I have the exact same problem with chocolate. (I can resist my chocolate cravings, but only if I'm not doing anything else, and so far I don't have a few weeks where I can be afford to be totally out of commission to detox from delicious chocolatey goodness in the hopes that this would make the cravings go away forever.)

And, as others have noted, we are not yet dealing with akrasia-fu that makes irreversible changes to our mental states, so we can always backpedal if we discover the results are not what we later decide we really want.

The idea that there even could be such an asymmetry is a confusion: if you manage to sort out your preferences so that you do something different than you're doing now, and that turns out to be a mistake, then it's no different than your current preferences turning out to be a mistake!

It's an illusion, in other words, that akrasia actually exists in the first place: you are simply acting on whatever preferences you happen to have at the moment, combined with whatever models you have for how best to achieve them. To do something different, you'd need to adjust either the preferences or the models.

Your current desires are not -- and cannot be -- acausal; they are and must be determined by the laws of physics. If you "overcome akrasia", then that too must be determined by physical cause and effect.

Neither state appears spontaneously out of the void, nor is akrasia a state of failure to follow the laws of physics. Akrasia is merely a state where the conscious model you have of your preferences fails to match your complete, actual preferences.

As long as you try to single out akrasia as if it were some kind of special case, you'll miss the point entirely. There is nothing in the human anatomy you can point to and say, "aha, there's akrasia", because that is merely a label for your confusion regarding what you (as a complete organism) "want".

Oops. I apologize for not reading carefully enough. I was looking at the text on the left-hand side of the 0-5 options ("0 - Haven't tried / 1 - Not very effective") and parsing that as "0 - haven't tried/not very effective".

I guess many other people made the same mistake I did though, since nobody else corrected me, and my comment was voted up and received another comment that presupposed that what I said was true.

The form/survey functionality of Google Docs allows a question to be required or not, so people could just not answer questions related to techniques they've never tried.

Indeed... that is a bit of a weak point of evolutionary psychology; it's likely that quite some behaviours have an evolutionary background, but it's very hard to proof -- and in quite some cases, you could 'proof' opposite conclusions; as Chomsky said:

"You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."

This is not to say that EP is wrong, just that things are hard to proof. E.g., compared to biological evolution, there are no fossils of ancient behaviours or intermediate forms and so on.

Probably should include that in the survey description... :) I would never have known, and might even have given an actual answer to that one.

PS: I know this is way too lated... but it's left here for future survey-makers...

Good point.

Esp. for the kind of things you can solve with to-do lists and the like, procrastination is a better name. The only reason to use the term akrasia) seems to be that a web-search will give better-quality results...