I guess I can see that if fatal accidents are rare, I guess, but I don’t think that was the case?
I agree that if driving incurs non-trivial risks of lasting damage, that’s indicative that the person isn’t trying very seriously to optimize some ambitious long-term goal.
At minimum, it seems like there ought to be pareto-improvements that are just as or close to as fun, but which entail a lot less risk?
This reasoning makes me think your model lacks gears about what it’s like to live with certain types of psychologies. Making pareto improvements for your habits is itself a task to be prioritized. Depending on what else you have going on in life and how difficult it is to you to replace one habit with a different one, it’s totally possible that for some period, it’s not rational for you to focus on the habit change.
Basically, because often the best way to optimize your utility comes from applying your strengths to solve a certain bottleneck under time pressure, the observation “this person engages in suboptimal-seeming behavior some of the time” provides very little predictive evidence.
In fact, if you showed me someone who never engaged in such suboptimal behavior, I’d be tempted to wonder if they’re maybe not optimizing hard enough in that one area that matters more than everything else they could do.
That said, it is a bit hard to empathize with “driving recklessly while singing” as a hard-to-change behavior. It doesn’t sound like something particularly compulsive, except maybe if the impulse to sing came from exuberant happiness due to amphetamine use. But who knows. Von Neumann for sure had an unusual brain and maybe he often had random overwhelming feelings of euphoria.
I agree that if driving incurs non-trivial risks of lasting damage, that’s indicative that the person isn’t trying very seriously to optimize some ambitious long-term goal.
This reasoning makes me think your model lacks gears about what it’s like to live with certain types of psychologies. Making pareto improvements for your habits is itself a task to be prioritized. Depending on what else you have going on in life and how difficult it is to you to replace one habit with a different one, it’s totally possible that for some period, it’s not rational for you to focus on the habit change.
Basically, because often the best way to optimize your utility comes from applying your strengths to solve a certain bottleneck under time pressure, the observation “this person engages in suboptimal-seeming behavior some of the time” provides very little predictive evidence.
In fact, if you showed me someone who never engaged in such suboptimal behavior, I’d be tempted to wonder if they’re maybe not optimizing hard enough in that one area that matters more than everything else they could do.
That said, it is a bit hard to empathize with “driving recklessly while singing” as a hard-to-change behavior. It doesn’t sound like something particularly compulsive, except maybe if the impulse to sing came from exuberant happiness due to amphetamine use. But who knows. Von Neumann for sure had an unusual brain and maybe he often had random overwhelming feelings of euphoria.