Silver Chairs, Paternalism, and Akrasia

This idea has internal relevance as well. You could easily consider, for instance, the self introspecting at home who wants to lose weight and the self in a restaurant who wants to order cheesecake as two sides of a Silver Chair**. And I think that view is more helpful than just calling it "akrasia", because it presents the situation as two aspects of your personality which happen to want different things, instead of some "weakness" which is interfering with your "true will". Then instead of castigating yourself for weakness of will, you merely think "I suppose my desire for cheesecake was stronger than I anticipated. When I return to a state where my desire to lose weight is dominant, I shall have to make stricter plans."

IAWYC, but I have trouble with this particular example. Quite often when I do eat that piece of cheesecake, I'm thinking "Oh no, I hate myself, I really shouldn't be doing this". On the other hand, I have no such feelings when the diet-self wins out over the dessert-self. That suggests that there is some fundamental asymmetry, and not just two different but equal selves involved.

Ok I'll react. I for one have wound up following my desires as they are.

I mean, far too often I could see the two sides of a coin, like "chocolate tastes good | that's going to ruin my health", and realize that indeed, the first part was stronger than the second one. Since I incur a net willpower cost for the weaker side, whenever I try to fight off the stronger impulse, I slowly but surely learned the habit to instantaneously bow and submit to my impulse, rather than wasting resources on what would turn out to be a lost cause in the end, anyway.

At first I did it only on those occasions where it didn't look like it was even relevant to push myself. Then I expanded the set of occasions where I'd submit, again and again. I could often see how it was either harmless to concede ground, or irrelevant to keep it. And now I'm pretty much ridden with akrasia and laziness.

The state where you follow your "rational" judgment is more fragile, and artificial than the one where you follow the natural impulse. It's easier to fall out of it than back in. And if you don't train it constantly, and if you grow into the habit of yielding, then you'll get even better at repeating the same pattern next time.

I'll give just one more general example, that is when you think something along the lines of "oh, I want X, but I shouldn't; ok, I'll just do a little bit of it, then I'll stop", where X can be a lot of things, like this apple pie, gaming time while you're studying, getting a wee bit too close to that special person you can't be close to, etc. Well, if it's already difficult to fight it off at first, it won't get easier once you've had a bit of it. To the contrary. And if you're sophisticate enough to generalize past experiences, pleasurable ones, then any such "mistake" will help you choose the impulse over the rational choice, next time.

On an absolute sense, I'd tend to believe that something fragile needs to be protected. Also, not a few of the actions I'll take against my best judgment, I know to be nefarious in one way or another.

Yes, I damn want those things I think I shouldn't want. In some cases, to the point where I'll actually defend them against myself or other's interference, even though I know that if I have to be consistent with my own values, I shouldn't, rather should I fight them. That , in general, sounds almost like a plea for help from the part of a mind that knows it's right, but too fragile to survive once it's made a few mistakes and has to compete with something much more vivid. If we end up saying that whatever side wins oneself over, is right, as long as you like it, then it's only selecting for the strongest of both opponents. Does might make right ?

The earliest description of akrasia that I'm aware of is by Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, chapter 7 verse 15: "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (NIV). The Christians explained these feelings as due to deliberate temptation by external (and internal) evil forces. The appropriate response to temptation is willpower. (A more doctrinal response might be faith and prayer, but in practice having faith seems a lot like giving yourself a willpower placebo.) That's probably where our ideas about how to deal with akrasia come from.

The best advice I've heard about silver chairs is that, if you're torn in two different ways about a decision, it's because both have high utility or both have low utility, but the difference in utility as far as you can see is negligible. And that means that you're indifferent; so you shouldn't worry about it.

I have some experience with dieting and exercise. I think that a lot of people who feel themselves in a silver chair over dieting are really suffering from merely believing that they want to diet (see earlier discussions by EY on OB); or from having set up "lose weight" as a final goal rather than as an instrumental goal. Once I really believed that dieting and exercise would get me what I wanted, it suddenly became easy. Which means that I was only doing what I wanted to do all along. The me in the silver chair eating the cheesecake wasn't really a different me. It was, like in the story, the more fully-aware me; and once I really wanted to lose weight, instead of merely believing that I wanted to lose weight, it cooperated happily.

I would say it is not, that our preference for one side of the Silver Chair over the other is simple bias in favor of mental states similar to our own.

Interesting. I am reminded of how annoying it is to recall states of happiness and mirth when I'm upset about something, and vice versa.

I think you raise a very interesting question and I have strong sympathies for your conclusion. That having been said, there is a point at which it's possible to tell that someone is behaving irrationally in an absolute sense. By that, I mean that it can be determined that someone's behavior is systematically incompatible with achieving some important items among their desires (whatever those desires may be). I don't mean the desires they would have if something were done to get them out of the Silver Chair - I mean the desires they actually do have at the time, that they're not achieving because there is something interfering.

For instance, the drunk who does not believe he has a problem does not harbor a secret desire to destroy his family or die of cirrhosis at an early age or kill people in car accidents by driving under the influence. His belief that he does not have a problem is interfering with his avoidance of those nondesiderata. It's not that either his rational mind or the drinking have changed his desires re: kin estrangement/his liver/automobile accidents; it's that his desire for alcohol has hijacked his thought process to the point where he can't connect the excess of booze to the nondesiderata. If it's possible to excise the hijacking desire, other desires which are also important to the drunk will be in a better position to be fulfilled.

It's when we start being paternalistic, to achieve ends that the subject does not share at all and to save no one but the subject, that it becomes deeply murky territory.

And I think that view is more helpful than just calling it "akrasia", because it presents the situation as two aspects of your personality which happen to want different things, instead of some "weakness" which is interfering with your "true will".

Nice point.

BTW, the Silver Chair contains the defense of Christianity that I've probably heard Christians cite more than any other single source: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

People are mentioning different "I am currently conflicted between two decisions" scenarios in the comments, but I don't think those are very good examples of the problem described in the post. In that case, it is a single person who feels torn to two different directions. He has difficulty deciding between those two, yes, but neither of the forces pulling at him is by itself conscious and self-aware (as far as we know). The desire of a sentient being isn't being violated when somebody manages to make a difficult decision.

In at least some of these cases there's a likely asymmetry between the two Sides of the Chair, which may make it harder to maintain that we shouldn't favour one side's preferences over the other's. Namely, in some cases one of the two states is not sustainable. For instance, it's impossible and/or impractical to be high on (say) heroin for more than a smallish fraction of your life. (I think that's true, but I am not a drug expert. If it happens not to be true about heroin, that probably just means I picked a bad example. [EDIT: as David Nelson points out, that was in fact a bad example, but replacing heroin with hallucinogens fixes it. END OF EDIT]) So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.

In some other cases, one state is indefinitely sustainable but only at a cost that both versions might (if they could be convinced that the cost is real) find unacceptable. For instance, one can doubtless stay crazy for ever, but if one could explain to crazy-you that taking the antipsychotic drugs at least most of the time will make it possible to have a job, a partner-of-the-appropriate-sex, a life that doesn't involve being locked up all the time, etc., then I suspect that even crazy-you might agree that the price is worth paying. (Of course, if crazy-you is crazy enough then this is a hopeless project. Too bad; can't win 'em all.) Or: even when you're guzzling chocolate cake, you might well agree that you have to moderate your appetite most of the time because even cake-guzzling-you doesn't want to be a ball of lard six feet in diameter.

I don't claim that this asymmetry makes it obviously definitely right to enforce the wishes of you-in-the-sustainable-state even when you're in the unsustainable state and have very different wishes; but it does seem to offer a better justification for doing so than "simple bias in favour of mental states similar to our own". In some cases, at least.

Your utils come from doing what you want, not being happy or successful, or finding the most efficient way to satisfy as many of your desires as possible, or anything else.

I agree with your main point. I disagree about this small bit, however as it appears to presuppose that giving in to an impulsive or compulsive desire is "what you want", and perhaps also that you cannot change "what you want". Ainslie notes that even many addictive desires are not actually "wanted", and most of the field of NLP as well as my own work shows that it's actually not that hard to change "what you want".

That having been said, I agree that condemning what you want is useless. Unless you incorporate information about your actual utilon sources into your decision-making, you will not be able to change with any consistency.

(Or, to put it another way: if you refuse to specifically acknowledge what you're giving up by changing your behavior, it's unlikely that you'll succeed in extinguishing the old behavior, or preventing substitute behaviors from arising.)

This is a very interesting post and regardless of any errors some may feel it has, I think it has the right idea. One of the problems with attributing failure to akrasia is that it doesn't always feel like you would have made the right choice if you had will power. For an example from my own life, sometimes rather than working on things that I do want to work on, I play video games, often rationalizing to myself that I just don't have the mental energy to do the work. But, really, it's more that I want to play the games, maybe more than do the work, than that I failed to have the will power to do the work (although I wish I had had the will power to overcome my desire to play the games and do the work).

You've definitely given us more precise language to use when discussing "failures" of will power.

The me of the future is a different person. But screw that guy, I'm sticking up for the me of now!

Your proposition is: "Utils come from you doing what you want, not being happy or successful, therefore, forcing people to do something they do not directly want to do is necessarily bad for their utility." This claim appears to contradict reality, or else it redifines utility into something new and quite different.

A necessary implication of this view would be that, given the constraints they faced, everyone is at their maximum possible utility, i.e. there is no choice that you (or anyone) would go back and change. Period. Full stop. Nothing you could have done would make your utility higher than it is.

This may be true for you personally, but I sincerely doubt that. Indeed, I doubt it's true for anyone with a working long-term memory. Thus, your definition is either empirically false or it redefines utility into something unrecognizable.

As your premise is false, the conclusion is trivial and unsupported.

Of course, if I misunderstand you, or if this theory can be supported by a true premise with a conventional concept of utility, please do so; the general idea is interesting and the post is certainly thought-provoking.

Couple defenses/explanations for the "Your utility is already maximized" conclusion: -Coercion: changing facts about choices (i.e. removing coercion) might increase your utility, but, if you can't change the constraints you faced, you would not have changed a single decision.) -Information: One could argue you'd now change your choice due to better information. But if better information would increase your utility, then your utility stemmed from the consequences of your decision, not your making the decision itself, thus falsifying the original proposition. -Unconsidered alternatives - it is possible that your utility would be higher if you had realized an alternative choice that never came to mind. Thus, all decisions you made you chose the best of the options you considered; were you aware of more options, you might have actually done better. It's unclear from the phrasing of this proposition if this would count as utility increasing. Nevertheless, I doubt there's anyone who does not think his utility would be higher had he made a different choice that had come to mind at the time.

I am struggling with the general point, but I think in some situations it is clear that one is in a "bad" state and needs improvement. Here is an example (similar to Chris Argyris's XY case).

A: "I don't think I'm being effective. How can I be of more help to X?"

B: "Well, just stop being so negative and pointing out others' faults. That just doesn't work and tends to make you look bad."

Here, B is giving advice on how to act, while at the same time acting contrary to that advice. The values B wants to follow are clearly not the values he is actually following; furthermore, B doesn't realize that this is happening (or he wouldn't act that way).

This seems to be a state that is clearly "bad", and shouldn't be seen as just different. If I am demonstrably and obliviously acting against my values as I would express them at the time, then I clearly need help. Note that this is different from saying that I am acting against some set of values I would consider good if I were in a different/better state of mind. The values I am unknowingly transgressing are the ones I think I'm currently trying to fulfill.

Does this make sense? What are your reactions?

By the way, this is a common situation; people feeling stress, threat, or embarrassment often start acting in this way.

""

Consumer confusion is a state of mind that leads to consumers making imperfect purchasing decisions or lacking confidence in the correctness of their purchasing decisions.[1]

Confusion

Confusion occurs when a consumer fails to correctly understand or interpret products and services.[2] This, in turn, leads to them making imperfect purchasing decisions. This concept is important to marketeers because consumer confusion may result in reduced sales, reduced satisfaction with products and difficulty communicating effectively with the consumer. It is a widely studied and broad subject which is a part of Consumer behaviour and Decision making.[3] Causes Choice overload

Choice overload (sometimes called overchoice in the context of confusion) occurs when the set of purchasing options becomes overwhelmingly large for a consumer. A good example is wine in the UK where supermarkets may present over 1000 different products leaving the consumer with a difficult choice process. Whilst large assortments do have some positive aspects (principally novelty and stimulation[4] and optimal solutions[5]) any assortment greater than around 12-14 products leads to confusion and specifically transferring the ownership of quality assurance to the consumer.[6] What this means in practice is reduced levels of satisfaction with purchases from large assortments as a consumer may be left with doubt that they have succeeded in finding the “best” product. Choice overload is growing with ever larger supermarkets and the internet being two of the main causes.[6] Similarity

Similarity is where two or more products lack differentiating features which prevents the consumer easily distinguishing between them. Differentiating features could be any from the marketing mix or anything else associated with the product such as brand. Similarity of products has the negative effect on the consumer of increasing the cognitive effort required to make a decision.[7] and reducing the perception of accuracy of decision. Both of these reduce the satisfaction with a decision and thereby satisfaction with the purchase. Lack of information

A consumer may suffer from lack of information if the information doesn’t exist, is unavailable to them at the required moment or is too complex for them to use in their decision making process. Information overload

Too much information surrounding a product or service disturbs the consumer by forcing them to engage in a more complex and time consuming purchasing process. This, and the fact that it is difficult to compare and value the information when it is superfluous, leaves the consumer unsatisfied, insecure regarding what choice to make, and more prone to delay the decision-making, and thereby the actual purchase.[8] Lack of consistency

When information provided on a product and/or service is not consistent with the consumer’s previously held beliefs and convictions, ambiguity occurs in the understanding of the product.[8]""

I know there are times when a little asymmetric paternalism to help me behave more rationally would have lead to the then-more desired outcome