Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics

This reminds me of a webcomic, where the author justifies his lack of self improvement, and his continual sucking at life:

"Pfft. I'll let Future Scott deal with it. That guy's a dick!"

http://kol.coldfront.net/comic/ (No perma-link; it's comic 192, if new one's been posted since I wrote this.)

When dealing with your future self there's an economic balancing act at play, because Future Self's values will inevitable shift. On the extreme side, if Omega had told Aurini'1989 that if he saves his $10 for ten years, it will grow to the point where he can buy every Ninja Turtle action figure out there, Aurini'1989 would have said, "Yes, but Aurini'1999 won't want Ninja Turtles anymore - however, he will likely value the memory of having played with Ninja Turtles." To hold the Future Self completely hostage to the desires of the present makes as little sense as holding the Present Self hostage to the desires of the future.

It breaks down to a tactical problem (which units do you build first in Civ 4?); I'm glad I spent money on that beer five years ago, because I still find value in the memory. What makes the problem difficult to solve is our fuzzy perceptions. First there's the issue of scope intensity; none of our senses are calibrated, including our sense of time. But there's also the issue of inconsistency of self. The 8 AM self which desires to be left alone to drink his coffee and read a book is a wildly different person than the 10 PM self hopped up on whiskey and telling the bartender how it really is.

The first problem is easy enough to correct for, you don't even need to be trained in rationality to accomplish this. Most people, if given the offer X period of suffering for Y period of benefit, will be able to make a cost/benefit analysis as to whether it is a good deal or not.* Aurini'2001 made this calculation when he joined the army. The numbers are fuzzy, but they're not inestimable. Furthermore, statistical studies (such as education level vs long-term earnings) can be used to bolster these calculations.

The real nut of the problem is the inconsistentcy of the self. We are wildly different people from moment to moment, regardless of a relatively consistent average over time. We are our values (apologies - I can't find who wrote the original post on this topic). We all have a number of ad hoc techniques we use to stay true to our primary goals, but I'm not sure what the broader solution would be.

I guess what I'm saying is that it isn't so much irrationality that causes you to stay up all night reading, instead of getting a good night's sleep. When we consider choices that aren't immediate, most people can make accurate judgements based upon the information they have. The bigger problem is how rapidly our values shift on minutiae. It's not just that the morning is relatively further away from now, than one month vs a month and a day - the bigger problem is that there's more personal variance between those times.

*Regarding the googleplex of dust motes vs a lifetime of torture dilemma: I think the scope intensity fail which occurred there is because a lifetime of torture could reasonably be expected to destroy the self; if it had been a week of torture, most people would volunteer, I think. It was an inability to empathize with a googleplex as opposed to an individual.

Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests

No, akrasia is acting against your better judgment. This comes apart from imprudence in both directions: (i) someone may be non-akratically imprudent, if they whole-heartedly endorse being biased towards the near; (ii) we may be akratic by failing to act according to other norms (besides prudence) that we reflectively endorse, e.g. morality.

I just have one question, it's so obvious but I don't remember it being asked anywhere.

Humans and all animals tested use hyperbolic discounting + hacks on top of it to deal with paradoxes. Why hasn't evolution implemented exponential discounting in any animal? Is it technically impossible the way brain works (perhaps by local optimum), or is hyperbolic discounting + hacks better in the real world than exponential discounting?

I think this is a far more fundamental problem than anything else about akrasia.

I used to have a system of implicit moral contract with myself.

I saw my own situation as an iterated prisoner dilemma; any of my future selves could desist against its other selves, negating the hopes and dreams of past selves, depriving further selves of certain prospects, all of that for a short term benefit that would have negative long term consequences. The first to desist would win something on the moment, the others loose their investment or their potential. So I tried to keep to my word and plan ahead.

Not sure if I'm still strong willed enough to affirm I'm working like that. Actually, probably not in most cases.

I found this article both interesting and informative. I definitely plan to spend some time studying picoeconomics.

One interesting effect that I have found in personal productivity efforts is that applying techniques to enforce resolution and overcome passive resistance can change the perceived emotional weighting between alternatives, often quite rapidly.

For example, let's say I'm reading LW instead of writing a term paper. I've made a (probably irrational) decision that the negative emotion of exerting the effort to write the term paper exceeds the negative emotion of having an incomplete assignment hanging over me. If I apply a pattern interrupt to get me started writing, my emotional weighting will shift, often within a matter of minutes - the effort of writing will not feel nearly as bad as the pressure of the unfinished assignment. Overcoming the emotional inertia of passive resistance shifts the perceived emotional weight of the alternatives.

Of course the challenge is to translate that knowledge into action. Even though I know that the emotional balance will likely shift, that doesn't alter the feeling of initial resistance. That challenge has sold and will continue to sell millions of self help books :) It's like an arms race between future/planning self and present moment self. For every pattern interrupt devised by future self, present self finds a defense to defuse the pattern interrupt and continue the present moment pleasurable activity.

The irony of reading LW as a present moment escape under the nominal guise of strengthening future self's ability to keep present self on course is not lost on me. And on that note, I'm off to get some work done.

Does hyperbolic discounting mean that the sunk-cost fallacy can be adaptive in certain situations, by "locking in" previous decisions?

I'd like to hear more about akrasia on LW. It seems to be supremely important.

Does evolutionary psychology provide an explanation for hyperbolic discounting? I found one explanation at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html#fnB27 but it doesn't seem to apply to the example of preference reversal between sleeping early and staying up.

The problem I have with considering future discounting is that it forces me to formulate a consistent personal identity across time scales longer than a few moments. I've never successfully managed that.

To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self

Can you describe 'my future self' without any sort of pronoun? If you could do that, the horror might, y'know, go away a bit. Thou art physics, after all.

as surely as if I knew the day a murder pill would be forced upon me.

Not quite as surely, otherwise you'd be taking steps to stop your mind changing day to day. This is exaggeration, even though the analogy works to a degree.

consider the alcoholic who moves to a town in which alcohol is not sold, anticipating a change in desires and deliberately constraining their own future self

So is 'the alcoholic' the optimiser that wants to keep drinking? Or the optimiser that wants to stop drinking? Or both? This article shows a tendency to view the mind as a point-particle of desire and value. It's nothing of the sort. We all have to accept that identity is a fuzzy, shifting entity. Trusting in rationality is an early step towards resolving this problem.

I wonder if hyperbolic discounting uses the visual processing system? It certainly works like perspective foreshortening.

Excellent article and topic. I suffer from this. My main problem (which is merely an excuse) is that there is a difference between what I think I want to do and what my body and mind actually wants to do when it's doing the things I tell it to do. Multiple selves become evident when this happens. The self that has planned the actions, and the self that - in doing those actions - gives up to do other (more fun) things. My approach is to make successive changes to the self who does those actions that 'I' plan, by trying to implement rules for him to follow. But I find it a constant uphill struggle, because he always outsmarts me.

His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agencies within a single person, an approach he terms "picoeconomics".

I haven't read Breakdown of Will, but Thomas Schelling makes a similar proposal in his articles on "egonomics".

On the broader question of how to respond to irrationality, I strongly recommend Jon Elster's chapter (including the references) in Explaining Social Behavior.

I haven't worked out the mathematical details, but qualitatively it seems to me that we discount the future more than expected because we don't know what our desires will be like in the future (but nevertheless want to maximize the happiness of our future selves, whatever that may consist in). This means whatever action I take now to benefit my future self has an extra decrement in (present) utility because of my uncertainty in how much the future self will be benefited. And then there's the higher-order effect that the future self may have turned into someone the present self doesn't want to benefit (maybe they want to gruesomely murder many people).

For example, I might pay less for tickets to the Bayreuth festival five years from now than I would for this year's tickets not only because of the loss of interest income, chance that the festival won't be around in five years, etc., but also because of the chance that I simply won't like Wagner as well in five years as I do now. (Of course, theater tickets are easily resalable, which should ameliorate the effect somewhat in that case.)

Therefore, since the murder pill is an example where you know exactly what your values will be at a future point, it may not be relevant to many more common instances of akrasia.

If we assume that (a) future discounting is potentially rational, and that (b) to be rational, the relative weightings we give to March 30 and March 31 should be the same whether it's March 29 or Jan 1, does it follow that rational future discounting would involve exponential decay? Like, a half-life?

For example, assuming the half life is a month, a day a month from now has half the weighting of today, and a month from that has half the weighting of that, and so on?

I was reminded of this post by a blog article I've just read: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/ - it covers the same topic, but I think it presents it in an easier-to-grasp way for folks who aren't actively trying to be more rational.

REBT therapy for short-term hedonism (hyperbolic discounting

Excellent food for thought. I especially loved the point relating the distance of the reward to the actual rewarding process itself, and yes defeating Akrasia is the one thing that is (probably) most relevant to Lesswrong readers. This is because most LW-ers are by nature (probably) smarter than their immediate surroundings and it is not understanding of situations that is holding them back. It then (yes, probably!) boil down to either interpersonal skills and/or Akrasia. And the two are not completely mutually exclusive.

This is , at least at first glance, an important step in the right direction.

Ainslie has written quite a few interesting papers in the meantime: http://picoeconomics.org/articles2.html

I generally object to use of the term rational as a moral pejorative as the way its used in the article. We are all dealing with imperfect information, quantum uncertainty and human identity issues. We may suck at it, but the advice to just be more "rational" is insulting to people who are trying their best in an imperfect world. If you think discounting or valuing the future is so easy that you can bandy about words like rational, then I can show you how to make a killing in the mortgage backed securities market.

Akrasia is a result, not a problem. A symptom, not the disease.