Beliefs and predictions that influence wants may be false or miscalibrated, but the feeling itself, the want itself, just is what it is, the same way sensations of hunger or heat just are what they are.
I think this may be part of the disconnect between me and the article. I often view the short jolt preferences (that you get from seeing an ice-cream shop) as heuristics, as effectively predictions paired with some simpler preference for “sweet things that make me feel all homey and nice”. These heuristics can be trained to know how to weigh the costs, though I agree just having a “that’s irrational” / “that’s dumb” is a poor approach to it.
Other preferences, like “I prefer these people to be happy” are not short-jolts but rather thought about and endorsed values that would take quite a bit more to shift—but are also significantly influenced by beliefs too.
Other values like “I enjoy this aesthetic” seem more central to your argument than short-jolts or considered values.
This is why you could view a smoker’s preference for another cigarette as irrational: the ‘core want’ is just a simple preference for the general feel of smoking a cigarette, but the short-jolt preference has the added prediction of “and this will be good to do”. But that added prediction is false and inconsistent with everything they know. The usual statement of “you would regret this in the future”. Unfortunately, the short-jolt preference often has enough strength to get past the other preferences, which is why you want to downweight it.
So, I agree that there’s various preferences that having them is disentangled from whether you’re rational or not, but that I also think most preferences are quite entangled with predictions about reality.
“inconsistent preferences” only makes sense if you presume you’re a monolithic entity, or believe your “parts” need to all be in full agreement all the time… which I think very badly misunderstands how human brains work.
I agree that humans can’t manage this, but it does still make sense for a non-monolithic entity—You’d take there being an inconsistency as a sign that there’s a problem, which is what people tend to do, even if ti can’t be fixed.
Commenting on a relatively isolated point in what you wrote; none of this affects your core point about preferences being entangled with predictions (actually it relies on it).
This is why you could view a smoker’s preference for another cigarette as irrational: the ‘core want’ is just a simple preference for the general feel of smoking a cigarette, but the short-jolt preference has the added prediction of “and this will be good to do”. But that added prediction is false and inconsistent with everything they know. The usual statement of “you would regret this in the future”.
I think that the short-jolt preference’s prediction is actually often correct; it’s just over a shorter time horizon. The short-term preference predicts that “if I take this smoke, then I will feel better” and it is correct. The long-term preference predicts that “I will later regret taking this smoke, ” and it is also correct. Neither preference is irrational, they’re just optimizing over different goals and timescales.
Now it would certainly be tempting to define rationality as something like “only taking actions that you endorse in the long term”, but I’d be cautious of that. Some long-term preferences are genuinely that, but many of them are also optimizing for something looking good socially, while failing to model any of the genuine benefits of the socially-unpopular short-term actions.
For example, smoking a cigarette often gives smokers a temporary feeling of being in control, and if they are going out to smoke together with others, a break and some social connection. It is certainly valid to look at those benefits and judge that they are still not worth the long-term costs… but frequently the “long-term” preference may be based on something like “smoking is bad and uncool and I shouldn’t do it and I should never say that there could be a valid reason to do for otherwise everyone will scold me”.
Then by maintaining both the short-term preference (which continues the smoking habit) and the long-term preference (which might make socially-visible attempts to stop smoking), the person may be getting the benefit from smoking while also avoiding some of the social costs of continuing.
This is obviously not to say that the costs of smoking would only be social. Of course there are genuine health reasons as well. But I think that quite a few people who care about “health” actually care about not appearing low status by doing things that everyone knows are unhealthy.
Though even if that wasn’t the case—how do you weigh the pleasure of a cigarette now, versus increased probability of various health issues some time in the future? It’s certainly very valid to say that better health in the future outweighs the pleasure in the now, but there’s also no objective criteria for why that should be; you could equally consistently put things other way around.
So I don’t think that smoking a cigarette is necessarily irrational in the sense of making an incorrect prediction. It’s more like a correct but only locally optimal prediction. (Though it’s also valid to define rationality as something like “globally optimal behavior”, or as the thing that you’d do if you got both the long-term and the short-term preference to see each other’s points and then make a decision that took all the benefits and harms into consideration.)
I think this may be part of the disconnect between me and the article. I often view the short jolt preferences (that you get from seeing an ice-cream shop) as heuristics, as effectively predictions paired with some simpler preference for “sweet things that make me feel all homey and nice”. These heuristics can be trained to know how to weigh the costs, though I agree just having a “that’s irrational” / “that’s dumb” is a poor approach to it. Other preferences, like “I prefer these people to be happy” are not short-jolts but rather thought about and endorsed values that would take quite a bit more to shift—but are also significantly influenced by beliefs too.
Other values like “I enjoy this aesthetic” seem more central to your argument than short-jolts or considered values.
This is why you could view a smoker’s preference for another cigarette as irrational: the ‘core want’ is just a simple preference for the general feel of smoking a cigarette, but the short-jolt preference has the added prediction of “and this will be good to do”. But that added prediction is false and inconsistent with everything they know. The usual statement of “you would regret this in the future”. Unfortunately, the short-jolt preference often has enough strength to get past the other preferences, which is why you want to downweight it.
So, I agree that there’s various preferences that having them is disentangled from whether you’re rational or not, but that I also think most preferences are quite entangled with predictions about reality.
I agree that humans can’t manage this, but it does still make sense for a non-monolithic entity—You’d take there being an inconsistency as a sign that there’s a problem, which is what people tend to do, even if ti can’t be fixed.
Commenting on a relatively isolated point in what you wrote; none of this affects your core point about preferences being entangled with predictions (actually it relies on it).
I think that the short-jolt preference’s prediction is actually often correct; it’s just over a shorter time horizon. The short-term preference predicts that “if I take this smoke, then I will feel better” and it is correct. The long-term preference predicts that “I will later regret taking this smoke, ” and it is also correct. Neither preference is irrational, they’re just optimizing over different goals and timescales.
Now it would certainly be tempting to define rationality as something like “only taking actions that you endorse in the long term”, but I’d be cautious of that. Some long-term preferences are genuinely that, but many of them are also optimizing for something looking good socially, while failing to model any of the genuine benefits of the socially-unpopular short-term actions.
For example, smoking a cigarette often gives smokers a temporary feeling of being in control, and if they are going out to smoke together with others, a break and some social connection. It is certainly valid to look at those benefits and judge that they are still not worth the long-term costs… but frequently the “long-term” preference may be based on something like “smoking is bad and uncool and I shouldn’t do it and I should never say that there could be a valid reason to do for otherwise everyone will scold me”.
Then by maintaining both the short-term preference (which continues the smoking habit) and the long-term preference (which might make socially-visible attempts to stop smoking), the person may be getting the benefit from smoking while also avoiding some of the social costs of continuing.
This is obviously not to say that the costs of smoking would only be social. Of course there are genuine health reasons as well. But I think that quite a few people who care about “health” actually care about not appearing low status by doing things that everyone knows are unhealthy.
Though even if that wasn’t the case—how do you weigh the pleasure of a cigarette now, versus increased probability of various health issues some time in the future? It’s certainly very valid to say that better health in the future outweighs the pleasure in the now, but there’s also no objective criteria for why that should be; you could equally consistently put things other way around.
So I don’t think that smoking a cigarette is necessarily irrational in the sense of making an incorrect prediction. It’s more like a correct but only locally optimal prediction. (Though it’s also valid to define rationality as something like “globally optimal behavior”, or as the thing that you’d do if you got both the long-term and the short-term preference to see each other’s points and then make a decision that took all the benefits and harms into consideration.)