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 define rationality as “more in line with your overall values”. There are problems here, because people do profess social values that they don’t really hold (in some sense), but roughly it is what they would reflect on and come up with.
Someone could value the short-term more than the long-term, but I think that most don’t. I’m unsure if this is a side-effect of Christianity-influenced morality or just a strong tendency of human thought.
Locally optimal is probably the correct framing, but that it is irrational relative to whatever idealized values the individual would have. Just like how a hacky approximation of a Chess engine is irrational relative to Stockfish—they both can be roughly considered to have the same goal, just one has various heuristics and short-term thinking that hampers it.
These heuristics can be essential, as it runs with less processing power, but in the human mind they can be trained and tuned.
Though I do agree that smoking isn’t always irrational: I would say smoking is irrational for the supermajority of human minds, however.
The social negativity around smoking may be what influences them primarily, but I’d consider that just another fragment of being irrational— >90% of them would have a value for their health, but they are varying levels of poor at weighting the costs and the social negativity response is easier for the mind to emulate. Especially since they might see people walking around them while they’re out taking a cigarette.
(Of course, the social approval is some part of a real value too; though people have preferences about which social values they give into)
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.
Indeed, and there’s another big reason for that—trying to always override your short-term “monkey brain” impulses just doesn’t work that well for most people. That’s the root of akrasia, which certainly isn’t a problem that self-identified rationalists are immune to. What seems to be a better approach is to find compromises, where you develop workable long-term strategies which involve neither unlimited amounts of proverbial ice cream, nor total abstinence.
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.
Which is a good thing, in this particular case, yes? That’s cultural evolution properly doing its job, as far as I’m concerned.
Indeed, and there’s another big reason for that—trying to always override your short-term “monkey brain” impulses just doesn’t work that well for most people.
+1.
Which is a good thing, in this particular case, yes?
Less smoking does seem better than more smoking. Though generally it doesn’t seem to me like social stigma would be a very effective way of reducing unhealthy behaviors—lots of those behaviors are ubiquitous despite being somewhat low-status. I think the problem is at least threefold:
As already mentioned, social stigma tends to cause optimization to avoid having the appearance of doing the low-status thing, instead of optimization to avoid doing the low-status thing. (To be clear, it does cause the latter too, but it doesn’t cause the latter anywhere near exclusively.)
Social stigma easily causes counter-reactions where people turn the stigmatized thing into an outright virtue, or at least start aggressively holding that it’s not actually that bad.
Shame makes things wonky in various ways. E.g. someone who feels they’re out of shape may feel so much shame about the thought of doing badly if they try to exercise, they don’t even try. For compulsive habits like smoking, there’s often a loop where someone feels bad, turns to smoking to feel momentarily better, then feels even worse for having smoked, then because they feel even worse they are drawn even more strongly into smoking to feel momentarily better, etc.
I think generally people can maintain healthy habits much more consistently if their motivation comes from genuinely believing in the health benefits and wanting to feel better. But of course that’s harder to spread on a mass scale, especially since not everyone actually feels better from healthy habits (e.g. some people feel better from exercise but some don’t).
Then again, for the specific example of smoking in particular, stigma does seem to have reduced the amount of it (in part due to mechanisms like indoor smoking bans), so sometimes it does work anyway.
Though generally it doesn’t seem to me like social stigma would be a very effective way of reducing unhealthy behaviors
I agree, as far as it goes, but surely we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss stigma, as uncouth as it might seem, if our social technology isn’t developed enough yet to actually provide any very effective approaches instead? Humans are wired to care about status a great deal, so it’s no surprise that traditional enforcement mechanisms tend to lean heavily into that.
I think generally people can maintain healthy habits much more consistently if their motivation comes from genuinely believing in the health benefits and wanting to feel better.
Humans are also wired with hyperbolic discounting, which doesn’t simply go away when you brand it as an irrational bias. (I do in general feel that this community is too quick to dismiss “biases” as “irrational”, they clearly were plenty useful in the evolutionary environment, and I’d guess still aren’t quite as obsolete as the local consensus would have it, but that’s a different discussion.)
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.)
I define rationality as “more in line with your overall values”. There are problems here, because people do profess social values that they don’t really hold (in some sense), but roughly it is what they would reflect on and come up with.
Someone could value the short-term more than the long-term, but I think that most don’t. I’m unsure if this is a side-effect of Christianity-influenced morality or just a strong tendency of human thought.
Locally optimal is probably the correct framing, but that it is irrational relative to whatever idealized values the individual would have. Just like how a hacky approximation of a Chess engine is irrational relative to Stockfish—they both can be roughly considered to have the same goal, just one has various heuristics and short-term thinking that hampers it. These heuristics can be essential, as it runs with less processing power, but in the human mind they can be trained and tuned.
Though I do agree that smoking isn’t always irrational: I would say smoking is irrational for the supermajority of human minds, however. The social negativity around smoking may be what influences them primarily, but I’d consider that just another fragment of being irrational— >90% of them would have a value for their health, but they are varying levels of poor at weighting the costs and the social negativity response is easier for the mind to emulate. Especially since they might see people walking around them while they’re out taking a cigarette. (Of course, the social approval is some part of a real value too; though people have preferences about which social values they give into)
Indeed, and there’s another big reason for that—trying to always override your short-term “monkey brain” impulses just doesn’t work that well for most people. That’s the root of akrasia, which certainly isn’t a problem that self-identified rationalists are immune to. What seems to be a better approach is to find compromises, where you develop workable long-term strategies which involve neither unlimited amounts of proverbial ice cream, nor total abstinence.
Which is a good thing, in this particular case, yes? That’s cultural evolution properly doing its job, as far as I’m concerned.
+1.
Less smoking does seem better than more smoking. Though generally it doesn’t seem to me like social stigma would be a very effective way of reducing unhealthy behaviors—lots of those behaviors are ubiquitous despite being somewhat low-status. I think the problem is at least threefold:
As already mentioned, social stigma tends to cause optimization to avoid having the appearance of doing the low-status thing, instead of optimization to avoid doing the low-status thing. (To be clear, it does cause the latter too, but it doesn’t cause the latter anywhere near exclusively.)
Social stigma easily causes counter-reactions where people turn the stigmatized thing into an outright virtue, or at least start aggressively holding that it’s not actually that bad.
Shame makes things wonky in various ways. E.g. someone who feels they’re out of shape may feel so much shame about the thought of doing badly if they try to exercise, they don’t even try. For compulsive habits like smoking, there’s often a loop where someone feels bad, turns to smoking to feel momentarily better, then feels even worse for having smoked, then because they feel even worse they are drawn even more strongly into smoking to feel momentarily better, etc.
I think generally people can maintain healthy habits much more consistently if their motivation comes from genuinely believing in the health benefits and wanting to feel better. But of course that’s harder to spread on a mass scale, especially since not everyone actually feels better from healthy habits (e.g. some people feel better from exercise but some don’t).
Then again, for the specific example of smoking in particular, stigma does seem to have reduced the amount of it (in part due to mechanisms like indoor smoking bans), so sometimes it does work anyway.
I agree, as far as it goes, but surely we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss stigma, as uncouth as it might seem, if our social technology isn’t developed enough yet to actually provide any very effective approaches instead? Humans are wired to care about status a great deal, so it’s no surprise that traditional enforcement mechanisms tend to lean heavily into that.
Humans are also wired with hyperbolic discounting, which doesn’t simply go away when you brand it as an irrational bias. (I do in general feel that this community is too quick to dismiss “biases” as “irrational”, they clearly were plenty useful in the evolutionary environment, and I’d guess still aren’t quite as obsolete as the local consensus would have it, but that’s a different discussion.)