I often mistakenly behave as if my payoff structure is binary instead of gradual. I think others do too, and this cuts across various areas.
For instance, I might wrap up my day and notice that it’s already 11:30pm, though I’d planned to go to sleep an hour earlier, by 10:30pm. My choice is, do I do a couple of me-things like watch that interesting YouTube video I’d marked as “watch later”, or do I just go to sleep ASAP? I often do the former and then predictably regret it the next day when I’m too tired to function well. I’ve reflected on what’s going on in my mind (with the ultimate goal of changing my behavior) and I think the simplest explanation is that I behave as if the payoff curve, in this case of length of sleep, is binary rather than gradual. Rational decision-making would prescribe that, especially once you’re getting less rest than you need, every additional hour of sleep is worth more rather than less. However, I suspect my instinctive thought process is something like “well, I’ve already missed my sleep target even if I go to sleep ASAP, so might as well watch a couple of videos and enjoy myself a little since my day tomorrow is already shot.”
This is pretty terrible! It’s the opposite of what I should be doing!
Maybe something like this is going on when poor people spend a substantial fraction of their income on the lottery (I’m already poor and losing an extra $20 won’t change that, but if I win I’ll stop being poor, so let me try) or when people who are out of shape choose not to exercise (I’m already pretty unhealthy and one 30-minute workout won’t change that, so why waste my time.) or when people who have a setback in their professional career have trouble picking themselves back up (my story is not going to be picture perfect anyway, so why bother.)
It would be good to have some kind of mental reframing to help me avoid this prectictably regrettable behavior.
I think you’re probably quite correct about that example, and similar things. I notice other people doing this a lot, and I catch myself at it sometimes. So I think noticing and eliminating this particular flaw in logic is helpful.
I also think the underlying problem goes deeper. Because we want to stay up and watch that video, our brain will come up with excuses to do it, and we’ll be biased to just quickly accept those excuses when we otherwise would recognize them as logically flawed, because we want to.
This is motivated reasoning. I think it’s the single most impactful and pervasive bias. I spent some years studying this, but I haven’t yet gotten around to writing about it on LW because it’s not directly alignment-relevant. I really need to do at least a short post, because it is relevant for basically navigating and understanding all psychology. Including the field of alignment research.
This raises the question of what it means to want to do something, and who exactly (or which cognitive system) is doing the wanting.
Of course I do want to keep watching YT, but I also recognize there’s a cost to it. So on some level, weighing the pros and cons, I (or at least an earlier version of me) sincerely do want to go to bed by 10:30pm. But, in the moment, the tradeoffs look different from how they appeared from further away, and I make (or, default into) a different decision.
An interesting hypothetical here is whether I’d stay up longer when play time starts at 11:30pm than when play time starts at, say, 10:15pm (if bedtime is 10:30pm). The wanting to play, and the temptation to ignore the cost, might be similar in both scenarios. But this sunk cost / binary outcome fallacy would suggest that I’ll (marginally) blow further past my deadline in the former situation than in the latter.
I recognize a very similar failure mode of instrumental rationality: I sometimes include in the decision process for an action not just the utility of that action itself, but also its probability. That is, I act on the expected utility of the action, not on its utility. Example:
I should hurry up enough to catch my train (hurrying up enough has high utility)
Based on experience, I probably won’t hurry up enough (hurrying up enough has low probability)
So the expected utility (utility*probability) of hurrying up enough is not very high
So I don’t hurry up enough
So I miss my train.
The mistake is to pay any attention to the expected utility (utility*probability) of an action, rather than just to its utility. The probability of what I will do is irrelevant to what I should do. The probability of an action should be the output, never the input of my decision. If one action has the highest utility, it should go to 100% probability (that is, I should do it) and all the alternative actions should go to 0 probability.
The scary thing is that recognizing this mistake doesn’t help with avoiding it.
I often mistakenly behave as if my payoff structure is binary instead of gradual. I think others do too, and this cuts across various areas.
For instance, I might wrap up my day and notice that it’s already 11:30pm, though I’d planned to go to sleep an hour earlier, by 10:30pm. My choice is, do I do a couple of me-things like watch that interesting YouTube video I’d marked as “watch later”, or do I just go to sleep ASAP? I often do the former and then predictably regret it the next day when I’m too tired to function well. I’ve reflected on what’s going on in my mind (with the ultimate goal of changing my behavior) and I think the simplest explanation is that I behave as if the payoff curve, in this case of length of sleep, is binary rather than gradual. Rational decision-making would prescribe that, especially once you’re getting less rest than you need, every additional hour of sleep is worth more rather than less. However, I suspect my instinctive thought process is something like “well, I’ve already missed my sleep target even if I go to sleep ASAP, so might as well watch a couple of videos and enjoy myself a little since my day tomorrow is already shot.”
This is pretty terrible! It’s the opposite of what I should be doing!
Maybe something like this is going on when poor people spend a substantial fraction of their income on the lottery (I’m already poor and losing an extra $20 won’t change that, but if I win I’ll stop being poor, so let me try) or when people who are out of shape choose not to exercise (I’m already pretty unhealthy and one 30-minute workout won’t change that, so why waste my time.) or when people who have a setback in their professional career have trouble picking themselves back up (my story is not going to be picture perfect anyway, so why bother.)
It would be good to have some kind of mental reframing to help me avoid this prectictably regrettable behavior.
I think you’re probably quite correct about that example, and similar things. I notice other people doing this a lot, and I catch myself at it sometimes. So I think noticing and eliminating this particular flaw in logic is helpful.
I also think the underlying problem goes deeper. Because we want to stay up and watch that video, our brain will come up with excuses to do it, and we’ll be biased to just quickly accept those excuses when we otherwise would recognize them as logically flawed, because we want to.
This is motivated reasoning. I think it’s the single most impactful and pervasive bias. I spent some years studying this, but I haven’t yet gotten around to writing about it on LW because it’s not directly alignment-relevant. I really need to do at least a short post, because it is relevant for basically navigating and understanding all psychology. Including the field of alignment research.
This raises the question of what it means to want to do something, and who exactly (or which cognitive system) is doing the wanting.
Of course I do want to keep watching YT, but I also recognize there’s a cost to it. So on some level, weighing the pros and cons, I (or at least an earlier version of me) sincerely do want to go to bed by 10:30pm. But, in the moment, the tradeoffs look different from how they appeared from further away, and I make (or, default into) a different decision.
An interesting hypothetical here is whether I’d stay up longer when play time starts at 11:30pm than when play time starts at, say, 10:15pm (if bedtime is 10:30pm). The wanting to play, and the temptation to ignore the cost, might be similar in both scenarios. But this sunk cost / binary outcome fallacy would suggest that I’ll (marginally) blow further past my deadline in the former situation than in the latter.
I recognize a very similar failure mode of instrumental rationality: I sometimes include in the decision process for an action not just the utility of that action itself, but also its probability. That is, I act on the expected utility of the action, not on its utility. Example:
I should hurry up enough to catch my train (hurrying up enough has high utility)
Based on experience, I probably won’t hurry up enough (hurrying up enough has low probability)
So the expected utility (utility*probability) of hurrying up enough is not very high
So I don’t hurry up enough
So I miss my train.
The mistake is to pay any attention to the expected utility (utility*probability) of an action, rather than just to its utility. The probability of what I will do is irrelevant to what I should do. The probability of an action should be the output, never the input of my decision. If one action has the highest utility, it should go to 100% probability (that is, I should do it) and all the alternative actions should go to 0 probability.
The scary thing is that recognizing this mistake doesn’t help with avoiding it.