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SoullessAutomaton comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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Indeed. But as you say, it's mostly whether you identify more strongly with the part of you that wants X (a drink, a cigarette, or, in my case, a bag of Utz Medley chips...) or the part of you that wants to be sober or healthy.
It's not uncommon for me to say, "Hey, I want X!" and then after my actions reveal that I didn't want X as much as something else, to say, "Wow, I guess I was wrong and didn't really want X."
Edit: my point here is that almost everyone sometimes has the experience of not knowing what they want, so it's easy to say that people also often have incorrect beliefs about their own preferences.
A lot of that comes down to how you define the "self".
Most of the time, when people speak of themselves in the first person, they seem to be referring to the reflective observer, the audience of the internal narrative, Hofstadter's strange loops, whatever you want to call it.
To what extent that observer is just along for the ride and subject to the whims of an arational but clever ape that calls the shots I don't know, but a lot of confusion arises from fuzzy use of the first person.
Indeed. Like many paradoxes, the whole problem of akrasia (both the philosophical side and the personal-life side) may very well boil down to the subtle assumptions invoked by the very use of the category "self".