This is a rather reductive approach to Ainslie. He’s not writing a self-help book. The upshot of his view is not simply that people get distracted from long-term goals by short-term goals, but rather that the self emerges from the need to manage conflicts between a variety of internal goals. Fervid declarations like “I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation” gets it exactly backwards. You don’t have a Self, except as a hacked-together construct that helps your goals get along.
More discussion here and especially more in the links to bhyde’s commentary.
This is a rather reductive approach to Ainslie. He’s not writing a self-help book. The upshot of his view is not simply that people get distracted from long-term goals by short-term goals, but rather that the self emerges from the need to manage conflicts between a variety of internal goals. Fervid declarations like “I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation” gets it exactly backwards. You don’t have a Self, except as a hacked-together construct that helps your goals get along.
More discussion here and especially more in the links to bhyde’s commentary.