I understand what you mean, but, under these lens, I’d be using “irrational” to describe thought processes that negatively affect attempts to estimate the foreseen benefits and costs of a decision, or that cause people to connect their foreseen benefits with actions that have no real reason to lead to those.
Also, the way the word is used on this site, “rationality” is also the art of managing to not have your short term benefits get in the way of the real long term benefits you’d rather choose, and in choosing which foreseen benefits and costs should matter most to you.
So the addict would be irrational if in his decision he considered only: “pleasure from drug + 10 utility”, “temporary pain from stopping − 50 utility”, rather than also “likelihood of slow disintegration of my life, 20% of −1000 utility”, and “slowly decreasing effects from the drug and likelihood of having increasing future difficulties in obtaining drug, −80% of future “pleasure from drug +10 utility”, because a) he’s not considering at all the third factor because it’s not certain, or b) he’s considering only the first two because they are temporally closer, or d) he thinks what has seen for every drug addict he knows that’s further in the temporal curve won’t hold true for him without having a good reason to think so. (this is not a good model of drug addiction I think, I was just trying to describe what I mean).
Still, this is not the kind of irrationality I was getting mad at, I think I was getting mad mostly at irrational decisions and thoughts that didn’t had evident “strong causes”, addiction and social pressure are strong causes.
Going down that rabbit hole was in my plans, I’ll check out behavioural economics.
I understand what you mean, but, under these lens, I’d be using “irrational” to describe thought processes that negatively affect attempts to estimate the foreseen benefits and costs of a decision, or that cause people to connect their foreseen benefits with actions that have no real reason to lead to those.
Also, the way the word is used on this site, “rationality” is also the art of managing to not have your short term benefits get in the way of the real long term benefits you’d rather choose, and in choosing which foreseen benefits and costs should matter most to you.
So the addict would be irrational if in his decision he considered only: “pleasure from drug + 10 utility”, “temporary pain from stopping − 50 utility”, rather than also “likelihood of slow disintegration of my life, 20% of −1000 utility”, and “slowly decreasing effects from the drug and likelihood of having increasing future difficulties in obtaining drug, −80% of future “pleasure from drug +10 utility”, because a) he’s not considering at all the third factor because it’s not certain, or b) he’s considering only the first two because they are temporally closer, or d) he thinks what has seen for every drug addict he knows that’s further in the temporal curve won’t hold true for him without having a good reason to think so. (this is not a good model of drug addiction I think, I was just trying to describe what I mean).
Still, this is not the kind of irrationality I was getting mad at, I think I was getting mad mostly at irrational decisions and thoughts that didn’t had evident “strong causes”, addiction and social pressure are strong causes.
Going down that rabbit hole was in my plans, I’ll check out behavioural economics.