Eliezer writes in the theory of fun that to sell an idea to someone, you usually don’t need to convince them it’s a good thing to live with for their whole life. You only need to convince them that the first hour or day after they choose is going to be good.
I think that’s a rational response, by the person you’re trying to convince. The more distant the promised reward of whatever someone is touting to me, the more it will cost to reach it, and the more convinced I would have to be before taking it seriously enough to even begin. Or to put that the other way round, show me something that I can do right now and experience evidence that it works, and the bar for you to sell it to me is much lower.
“Jam tomorrow” is the promise of crooks and charlatans.
That was, I believe, implicit in the original post. The reason that it’s scary is that it doesn’t just apply to scratching a rash, it also applies to doing hard drugs.
Reference points, as used by default, make it very easy to throw your life away. That’s what makes it scary.
I think that’s a rational response, by the person you’re trying to convince. The more distant the promised reward of whatever someone is touting to me, the more it will cost to reach it, and the more convinced I would have to be before taking it seriously enough to even begin. Or to put that the other way round, show me something that I can do right now and experience evidence that it works, and the bar for you to sell it to me is much lower.
“Jam tomorrow” is the promise of crooks and charlatans.
In the timespan under discussion
you just justified crack usage
That was, I believe, implicit in the original post. The reason that it’s scary is that it doesn’t just apply to scratching a rash, it also applies to doing hard drugs.
Reference points, as used by default, make it very easy to throw your life away. That’s what makes it scary.
“Jam now” is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
If I decide to, say, learn Spanish, then I expect every hour spent on the task, including the first one, to pay a perceptible return.
I accept this as a valid point—first hour/day is an important heuristic indicator of goodness, but Eli wrote
Or at least, that’s how it invariably worked in pre-legal societies. No wonder we’re mistrustful of delayed payoffs.