Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue and not a vice.
Tsk, tsk. You don’t collect your pension or gold watches, or drink alcohol, etc. You pay someone else your pension, give away a gold watch, and un-drink the alcohol.
He didn’t say that time flowed backwards, just the order of major life events. And you’d start out collecting your pension out of the nursing home, and give it up when you start working.
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
As Jiro and Toggle point out, this isn’t time reversal, this is Benjamin Button disease). I think the original short story, much more than the film, portrays this correctly as a tragi-comedy. For example, he’s a Brigadier-General, but he gets laughed out of the army because he looks like a 16-year-old.
I wonder about people who think that life would be better lived backwards, or that effect should precede cause. Isn’t this the universe telling you “Change your ways” in neon capital letters?
Well, the central thing would seem to be changing aging, which isn’t induced by any human actions (although you might say people who live healthier get to age more slowly) - if there’s any message from the universe in aging, that message is simply “fuck you for being here”.
Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
Tsk, tsk. You don’t collect your pension or gold watches, or drink alcohol, etc. You pay someone else your pension, give away a gold watch, and un-drink the alcohol.
He didn’t say that time flowed backwards, just the order of major life events. And you’d start out collecting your pension out of the nursing home, and give it up when you start working.
A simiar one by Vonnegut:
As Jiro and Toggle point out, this isn’t time reversal, this is Benjamin Button disease). I think the original short story, much more than the film, portrays this correctly as a tragi-comedy. For example, he’s a Brigadier-General, but he gets laughed out of the army because he looks like a 16-year-old.
I wonder about people who think that life would be better lived backwards, or that effect should precede cause. Isn’t this the universe telling you “Change your ways” in neon capital letters?
Well, the central thing would seem to be changing aging, which isn’t induced by any human actions (although you might say people who live healthier get to age more slowly) - if there’s any message from the universe in aging, that message is simply “fuck you for being here”.