Given your psychological situation, choosing to pursue one reasonable course of action may well be the best course of action. Maybe over time you’ll get over your akrasia issues, but until then, the optimal decision is to do as much good as you can given those issues.
Instrumental rationality is about the best course of action, yes. But stressing over things so much that you can’t achieve even the second- or third- or hundredth-best course of action isn’t instrumentally rational either.
This is a very good point, and I’ll be basing a later post around this theme.
Having said that, at the moment I don’t feel that I have akrasia issues. But in my decision-making, I certainly have to consider the hypothesis that I have akrasia issues that I am in denial about.
Given your psychological situation, choosing to pursue one reasonable course of action may well be the best course of action. Maybe over time you’ll get over your akrasia issues, but until then, the optimal decision is to do as much good as you can given those issues.
Instrumental rationality is about the best course of action, yes. But stressing over things so much that you can’t achieve even the second- or third- or hundredth-best course of action isn’t instrumentally rational either.
This is a very good point, and I’ll be basing a later post around this theme.
Having said that, at the moment I don’t feel that I have akrasia issues. But in my decision-making, I certainly have to consider the hypothesis that I have akrasia issues that I am in denial about.