A thought inspired by an exchange upthread with Vladimir, but more general than what we were immediately discussing:
It seems that (e.g., political) extremism may be a result of a certain perception of where the Schelling points are and an application of meta-level thinking to the slope, even where basic preferences aren’t changed much. Suppose that it is 11:30 and you are playing Civ. You want to play until 11:40 and then stop, but you know that if you do you’ll want to play until 11:50 and then stop, etc.
If you think everything is a nice round number, you can just say “I’m going to stop at 11:40” and then do it. This is great if you’re not lying to yourself, which you probably are. If you think :00s and :30s are nice round numbers, you can compare how you feel about stopping now, 10 minutes earlier than your current ideal, to stopping at midnight, 20 minutes after it. Trivially so for whatever other round numbers you might see, &c.
But suppose to yourself: “but why should my night be dictated by what I think at 11:30?” Well, because that’s who you are at this point in time, and thus whose desires reason consists in fulfilling, obviously. But: you are in a sense in a community of yourselves who will be making this decision for many nights in the future. And: perhaps you have preferences about your preferences not looking/being arbitrary—you look at your 11:00 self and sneer at her ignorance—wanting to end at 11:10! - and at your 12:00 self in horror—is this where we are headed? - but then realize how you must look to them, and reconsider. Even if your round numbers are every 10 minutes then you could stop at 11:40 like you naively prefer, you also realize that if you consistently applied whatever rule you’re about to, you wouldn’t get 11:40. So the choice is really between uninstalling the game and never sleeping again. If this tendency exhibits some pull and you’re hyperbolically discounting, then the larger the distance between your perceived round numbers the more sense it makes to go all-or-nothing (i.e. if you place 12 hedons on being non-arbitrary, then if your round numbers are every ten minutes ending 0 minutes from your preferred time and being abitrary may be clearly better than never playing or never sleeping and being consistent, whereas if your round numbers are on the hour..)
This is consistent with most of my (our?) prior beliefs about the tails of the political spectrum: that compared to moderates extremists are more interested in and familiar with the perspective of other times and cultures (even ones with politics “on the other side”,) less socially connected (to people in their own time and culture), prefer System 2 to System 1 reasoning, like big abstract ideas, &c. I don’t know if this is just a clever (or not all that clever) reformulation of existing commonsensical explanations for these things or if you could think of testable predictions that would distinguish them.
If you think everything is a nice round number, you can just say “I’m going to stop at 11:40” and then do it.
Meh. I just say “20 more minutes” and set up an alarm timer. Pomodoro technique FTW. (And when the alarm goes off, if I still want to do what I’m doing, I halve the time and restart the timer. This way, the total time I waste can’t exceed twice the original time I used, in this case 40 minutes.)
A thought inspired by an exchange upthread with Vladimir, but more general than what we were immediately discussing:
It seems that (e.g., political) extremism may be a result of a certain perception of where the Schelling points are and an application of meta-level thinking to the slope, even where basic preferences aren’t changed much. Suppose that it is 11:30 and you are playing Civ. You want to play until 11:40 and then stop, but you know that if you do you’ll want to play until 11:50 and then stop, etc.
If you think everything is a nice round number, you can just say “I’m going to stop at 11:40” and then do it. This is great if you’re not lying to yourself, which you probably are. If you think :00s and :30s are nice round numbers, you can compare how you feel about stopping now, 10 minutes earlier than your current ideal, to stopping at midnight, 20 minutes after it. Trivially so for whatever other round numbers you might see, &c.
But suppose to yourself: “but why should my night be dictated by what I think at 11:30?” Well, because that’s who you are at this point in time, and thus whose desires reason consists in fulfilling, obviously. But: you are in a sense in a community of yourselves who will be making this decision for many nights in the future. And: perhaps you have preferences about your preferences not looking/being arbitrary—you look at your 11:00 self and sneer at her ignorance—wanting to end at 11:10! - and at your 12:00 self in horror—is this where we are headed? - but then realize how you must look to them, and reconsider. Even if your round numbers are every 10 minutes then you could stop at 11:40 like you naively prefer, you also realize that if you consistently applied whatever rule you’re about to, you wouldn’t get 11:40. So the choice is really between uninstalling the game and never sleeping again. If this tendency exhibits some pull and you’re hyperbolically discounting, then the larger the distance between your perceived round numbers the more sense it makes to go all-or-nothing (i.e. if you place 12 hedons on being non-arbitrary, then if your round numbers are every ten minutes ending 0 minutes from your preferred time and being abitrary may be clearly better than never playing or never sleeping and being consistent, whereas if your round numbers are on the hour..)
This is consistent with most of my (our?) prior beliefs about the tails of the political spectrum: that compared to moderates extremists are more interested in and familiar with the perspective of other times and cultures (even ones with politics “on the other side”,) less socially connected (to people in their own time and culture), prefer System 2 to System 1 reasoning, like big abstract ideas, &c. I don’t know if this is just a clever (or not all that clever) reformulation of existing commonsensical explanations for these things or if you could think of testable predictions that would distinguish them.
Meh. I just say “20 more minutes” and set up an alarm timer. Pomodoro technique FTW. (And when the alarm goes off, if I still want to do what I’m doing, I halve the time and restart the timer. This way, the total time I waste can’t exceed twice the original time I used, in this case 40 minutes.)