Interestingly, an agent with an unitary utility function may still find itself in a situation similar to akrasia, if it can’t make a choice between two lines of actions, which have almost equal weights. This was described as a situation of Buridan ass by Lamport, and he shows that the problem doesn’t have easy solutions and cause real life accidents.
Another part of the problem is that if I have a to make choice between equal alternatives – and the situations of choice are always choice between seemingly equal alternatives, or there are no need to make a choice – is that I have to search for additional evidence which of the alternatives is better, and as result my choice is eventually decided by very small piece of evidence. This make me vulnerable for adversarial attacks by, say, sellers, which could press me to make a choice by saying “It is 5 per cent discount today.”
For cases where the equal weights are both ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, one can just ‘flip a coin’ (and notice any resistance to the outcome), and that’s what I’ve tried to learn to do, particularly for relatively small weights.
But for relatively large weights or, worse, for ‘opposing’ weights, i.e. one ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’, like a situation where one has to choose between escaping some large negative element but ay the cost of giving up another large positive element simultaneously, this ‘akrasia’ can feel very much like being (emotionally or psychically) torn in two. Often then the relevant consideration is something like a threshold, e.g. is the large negative element too negative?
Interestingly, an agent with an unitary utility function may still find itself in a situation similar to akrasia, if it can’t make a choice between two lines of actions, which have almost equal weights. This was described as a situation of Buridan ass by Lamport, and he shows that the problem doesn’t have easy solutions and cause real life accidents.
Another part of the problem is that if I have a to make choice between equal alternatives – and the situations of choice are always choice between seemingly equal alternatives, or there are no need to make a choice – is that I have to search for additional evidence which of the alternatives is better, and as result my choice is eventually decided by very small piece of evidence. This make me vulnerable for adversarial attacks by, say, sellers, which could press me to make a choice by saying “It is 5 per cent discount today.”
For cases where the equal weights are both ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, one can just ‘flip a coin’ (and notice any resistance to the outcome), and that’s what I’ve tried to learn to do, particularly for relatively small weights.
But for relatively large weights or, worse, for ‘opposing’ weights, i.e. one ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’, like a situation where one has to choose between escaping some large negative element but ay the cost of giving up another large positive element simultaneously, this ‘akrasia’ can feel very much like being (emotionally or psychically) torn in two. Often then the relevant consideration is something like a threshold, e.g. is the large negative element too negative?