In general I’ve found that making your preferences more explicit leads to a more satisfactory outcome on reflection. But I’m not sure how I should structure my time so as to balance the benefits of preference clarification with the costs of not acting towards my current approximation of my preference. Right now I’m using the heuristic of periodically doing preference clarification, with the periods being longer between higher-order preference clarification.
This issue also seems related to the question of when to go meta. I tried to get a discussion about that going here.
I didn’t follow this entirely, and I’d like to. Can you elaborate on why you need to balance the clarification with acting on the preference? I don’t see why they’re opposed.
Can you elaborate on why you need to balance the clarification with acting on the preference? I don’t see why they’re opposed.
I guess I was thinking they’re opposed in the way that any two possible actions are opposed; at any given time one could be higher value than the other. But perhaps you’re thinking that one can do them at the same time? In fact we might want to think of acting on preference as clarifying preference, in which case I don’t really know what to do. I’m not sure if we should do that yet, since I’m unclear as to whether we’re trying to discover preference or determine it.
Well, they’re opposed in that each of them takes some of your finite time and they can’t generally be combined, yes. But this is also true of sleeping and eating, and I don’t have trouble finding time for both. My remarks about taking responsibility for preferences weren’t really about when to choose to say them, but about phrasing them explicitly when I was going to say them anyway. I suppose you could call that discovering the preference, but I think of it more as observing—or, closer, as not letting myself get away with denying them.
In general I’ve found that making your preferences more explicit leads to a more satisfactory outcome on reflection. But I’m not sure how I should structure my time so as to balance the benefits of preference clarification with the costs of not acting towards my current approximation of my preference. Right now I’m using the heuristic of periodically doing preference clarification, with the periods being longer between higher-order preference clarification.
This issue also seems related to the question of when to go meta. I tried to get a discussion about that going here.
I didn’t follow this entirely, and I’d like to. Can you elaborate on why you need to balance the clarification with acting on the preference? I don’t see why they’re opposed.
I guess I was thinking they’re opposed in the way that any two possible actions are opposed; at any given time one could be higher value than the other. But perhaps you’re thinking that one can do them at the same time? In fact we might want to think of acting on preference as clarifying preference, in which case I don’t really know what to do. I’m not sure if we should do that yet, since I’m unclear as to whether we’re trying to discover preference or determine it.
Well, they’re opposed in that each of them takes some of your finite time and they can’t generally be combined, yes. But this is also true of sleeping and eating, and I don’t have trouble finding time for both. My remarks about taking responsibility for preferences weren’t really about when to choose to say them, but about phrasing them explicitly when I was going to say them anyway. I suppose you could call that discovering the preference, but I think of it more as observing—or, closer, as not letting myself get away with denying them.