Imagine how much charitable giving you could do in the future when you’re living for a million years and everybody eats lasers.
LOL’d and upvoted. BUT...
There should not need to be an article like this.
...only if you mean “should” in the same way that people “should” act rationally, but don’t.
The Prochaska/Norcross Observation (I don’t know that it has a formal name, so I’m just dubbing it that for now) notes that to make a commitment to action, a person must first increase their estimate of the benefits by 1 standard deviation, and THEN decrease their estimate of the drawbacks by .5 standard deviations.
In other words, first you have to want the thing, and then you have to be convinced that it’s not going to be too much trouble/risk to get it. These statistics were found to apply across a broad variety of significant life changes.
(And of course, direct marketers can also be observed to play by these rules in how they construct their presentations and offers. But whether you call it “marketing” or an “anti-akrasia technique” is purely a matter of perspective.)
Edit to add: the Prochaska/Norcross Observations are officially known as the “Strong and Weak Principles Of Behavior Change”. (I think my name sounds better, but what can you do?) The findings have been replicated in other experiments (see page 17 or search for “T points”) and observed in other meta-analyses, although the larger “trans-theoretical” framework that Prochaska et al formulated is a bit of a mixed bag. I never found it all that interesting myself, compared to the Strong/Weak principles themselves.)
LOL’d and upvoted. BUT...
...only if you mean “should” in the same way that people “should” act rationally, but don’t.
The Prochaska/Norcross Observation (I don’t know that it has a formal name, so I’m just dubbing it that for now) notes that to make a commitment to action, a person must first increase their estimate of the benefits by 1 standard deviation, and THEN decrease their estimate of the drawbacks by .5 standard deviations.
In other words, first you have to want the thing, and then you have to be convinced that it’s not going to be too much trouble/risk to get it. These statistics were found to apply across a broad variety of significant life changes.
(And of course, direct marketers can also be observed to play by these rules in how they construct their presentations and offers. But whether you call it “marketing” or an “anti-akrasia technique” is purely a matter of perspective.)
Edit to add: the Prochaska/Norcross Observations are officially known as the “Strong and Weak Principles Of Behavior Change”. (I think my name sounds better, but what can you do?) The findings have been replicated in other experiments (see page 17 or search for “T points”) and observed in other meta-analyses, although the larger “trans-theoretical” framework that Prochaska et al formulated is a bit of a mixed bag. I never found it all that interesting myself, compared to the Strong/Weak principles themselves.)
I’m pretty sure that’s the only sense of “should” I use. The normative kind.