I don’t want to discourage you from something that works for you, but this model doesn’t fit me very well, and I don’t know how well it’ll apply to others.
> Usually, bad habits are bad because you do them so often.
Really? I mean it’s not a habit if you don’t do it repeatedly, but the badness is because of the harm or impact of the action(s), not the frequency. Frequency DOES increase the impact, but whether it’s linear or sub- (declining marginal harm) or super- (compounding harm) is going to vary by a lot, depending on circumstance and behavior.
> Future You is also you, your future actions are correlated significantly with your present actions. If your decision algorithm outputs <do bad habit> right now, it is very likely to output <do bad habit> whenever you are in this situation in the future.
The degree and causality of correlation are important here. Your brother isn’t you, but his actions on many topics are correlated with yours. You’re more likely than random to consume similar amounts of alcohol, for instance.
In my model, Future Me is NOT identical to me—there are similarities, and there is continuity (only in one direction), but there’s not actual identity. There are LOTS of decisions that I make differently at different times. Also, I really resent Past Me—he got all the fun, and I have to live with the results.
> But what if you just want to do the bad thing less, but not never?
I think you need to more clearly define “bad” if that’s the case. If you want to do bad things but only sometimes, either you’re intentionally causing harm (only sometimes), or you’re overcategorizing as “bad” something that is actually “good, in moderation”. If it’s “good for me, bad for future-me”, then you need to figure out what a reasonable discount rate is and decide whether it’s net-good.
Disagreements about what discount rate should have been used are the primary driver of hatred of Past Me, though I’m pretty sure Future Me will be equally wrong in the other direction..
I view this post through the lens that most bad habits are things like smoking and drinking. Done in sufficient moderation, they are fine, but done too much, and they are destructive.
For example, let’s say Alice likes smoking, but know that if she smokes a pack a day it’ll be bad for her health. She does some math that decide that 1 cigarette a week is as much health risk as she can afford for the joy of smoking. Or, to make the implementation simpler, let’s say 3 packs a year (60 cigarettes per annum).
It’s not unreasonable that she might do something like buy 3 packs at the start of the year, and when she’s out she’s out. It’s a simple commitment to say she will buy no more packs, but then give herself freedom to smoke those packs however she wants. It contains the damage, minimizes the risk, and eliminates the difficulty of having zero cigarettes.
Similar solutions can apply to most habits you consider bad: give yourself a bad habit budget, spend the budget how you want, and hold yourself to the budget.
Another thing I found useful is a voluntary per-occurrence “tax” (e.g. when for each actually smoked cigarette you move a noticeable chunk of money, e.g. $20, somewhere (could be charity, could be just some place “within your own family”)).
It’s a bit more flexible (that’s how I stopped smoking, and I gradually raised the amount (from 10, to 20, to 30 dollars per cigarette, but money were worth more back then)). This exercises the circuits in one’s brain which do not want to spend money (I am not sure that this would work for everyone).
The main weakness of this method is the same as the main weakness of OP. One needs a well-defined event, an act to prevent.
For example, if the bad habit is a “pattern of eating incorrectly”, it might be more difficult to handle in this fashion. What exactly should be decided by the coin toss, or what exactly should trigger the voluntary “sin tax”? With food it might be more difficult to specify, because there are so many ways one might slip… A particular feature (like systematically eating too close to bed time) can be alleviated this way…
Thank you for the feedback. I am also confused about what exactly counts as a “bad habit” and why bad habits are bad (see footnote 1). I think one way of avoiding this confusion and still being able to reason about this argument is to just say that doing the bad habit less is less bad (or maybe “good in moderation”?), and doing the bad habit more is more bad. The point still stands: when your future actions are correlated with your present action, the singular action feels more weighty.
In my model, Future Me is NOT identical to me
I agree that future me is not identical to myself either. I think the correlation is high enough that it matters for me, but might not for everyone.
Disagreements about what discount rate should have been used are the primary driver of hatred of Past Me, though I’m pretty sure Future Me will be equally wrong in the other direction..
Agreed. A similar point that I wish I had included in the OP is that this situation can be seen through the lens of acausal trade between your past and future selves: running something like UDT with respect to choices that will affect your future self, you’ll find your present self in better situations because your past self also ran UDT, so you continue with running UDT because of <insert favorite motivation of UDT here>. Importantly, this should work even if you have a high (or higher than you would like) discount rate.
I don’t want to discourage you from something that works for you, but this model doesn’t fit me very well, and I don’t know how well it’ll apply to others.
> Usually, bad habits are bad because you do them so often.
Really? I mean it’s not a habit if you don’t do it repeatedly, but the badness is because of the harm or impact of the action(s), not the frequency. Frequency DOES increase the impact, but whether it’s linear or sub- (declining marginal harm) or super- (compounding harm) is going to vary by a lot, depending on circumstance and behavior.
> Future You is also you, your future actions are correlated significantly with your present actions. If your decision algorithm outputs <do bad habit> right now, it is very likely to output <do bad habit> whenever you are in this situation in the future.
The degree and causality of correlation are important here. Your brother isn’t you, but his actions on many topics are correlated with yours. You’re more likely than random to consume similar amounts of alcohol, for instance.
In my model, Future Me is NOT identical to me—there are similarities, and there is continuity (only in one direction), but there’s not actual identity. There are LOTS of decisions that I make differently at different times. Also, I really resent Past Me—he got all the fun, and I have to live with the results.
> But what if you just want to do the bad thing less, but not never?
I think you need to more clearly define “bad” if that’s the case. If you want to do bad things but only sometimes, either you’re intentionally causing harm (only sometimes), or you’re overcategorizing as “bad” something that is actually “good, in moderation”. If it’s “good for me, bad for future-me”, then you need to figure out what a reasonable discount rate is and decide whether it’s net-good.
Disagreements about what discount rate should have been used are the primary driver of hatred of Past Me, though I’m pretty sure Future Me will be equally wrong in the other direction..
I view this post through the lens that most bad habits are things like smoking and drinking. Done in sufficient moderation, they are fine, but done too much, and they are destructive.
For example, let’s say Alice likes smoking, but know that if she smokes a pack a day it’ll be bad for her health. She does some math that decide that 1 cigarette a week is as much health risk as she can afford for the joy of smoking. Or, to make the implementation simpler, let’s say 3 packs a year (60 cigarettes per annum).
It’s not unreasonable that she might do something like buy 3 packs at the start of the year, and when she’s out she’s out. It’s a simple commitment to say she will buy no more packs, but then give herself freedom to smoke those packs however she wants. It contains the damage, minimizes the risk, and eliminates the difficulty of having zero cigarettes.
Similar solutions can apply to most habits you consider bad: give yourself a bad habit budget, spend the budget how you want, and hold yourself to the budget.
Right.
Another thing I found useful is a voluntary per-occurrence “tax” (e.g. when for each actually smoked cigarette you move a noticeable chunk of money, e.g. $20, somewhere (could be charity, could be just some place “within your own family”)).
It’s a bit more flexible (that’s how I stopped smoking, and I gradually raised the amount (from 10, to 20, to 30 dollars per cigarette, but money were worth more back then)). This exercises the circuits in one’s brain which do not want to spend money (I am not sure that this would work for everyone).
The main weakness of this method is the same as the main weakness of OP. One needs a well-defined event, an act to prevent.
For example, if the bad habit is a “pattern of eating incorrectly”, it might be more difficult to handle in this fashion. What exactly should be decided by the coin toss, or what exactly should trigger the voluntary “sin tax”? With food it might be more difficult to specify, because there are so many ways one might slip… A particular feature (like systematically eating too close to bed time) can be alleviated this way…
Thank you for the feedback. I am also confused about what exactly counts as a “bad habit” and why bad habits are bad (see footnote 1). I think one way of avoiding this confusion and still being able to reason about this argument is to just say that doing the bad habit less is less bad (or maybe “good in moderation”?), and doing the bad habit more is more bad. The point still stands: when your future actions are correlated with your present action, the singular action feels more weighty.
I agree that future me is not identical to myself either. I think the correlation is high enough that it matters for me, but might not for everyone.
Agreed. A similar point that I wish I had included in the OP is that this situation can be seen through the lens of acausal trade between your past and future selves: running something like UDT with respect to choices that will affect your future self, you’ll find your present self in better situations because your past self also ran UDT, so you continue with running UDT because of <insert favorite motivation of UDT here>. Importantly, this should work even if you have a high (or higher than you would like) discount rate.