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Furcas comments on Why *I* fail to act rationally - Less Wrong
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This touches on what for me is one of the big open questions on what it means to act rationally. I question the common position that the kinds of 'irrational' decisions you describe are actually all that irrational. Many such decisions seem to be rational decisions for an agent with a high time preference at the moment of decision. They may seem irrational from the perspective of a future self who looks back on the decisions when dealing with the consequences but I see the problem as more one of conflicting interests between present selves and past/future selves than one strictly of rationality. As the recent post discussed, rationality doesn't provide goals, it only offers a system for achieving goals. Many apparently irrational decisions are I suspect rational responses to short term goals that conflict with longer term goals.
If I decide to eat a chocolate bar now to satisfy a current craving, I am not really acting irrationally. I have a powerful short term drive to eat chocolate and there is nothing irrational in my actions to satisfy that short term goal. Later on I may look at the scales and regret eating the chocolate but that reflects either a conflict between short term and long term goals or a conflict between the goals of my present self and my past self (really just alternative ways of looking at the same problem). It is not a failure of rationality in terms of short term decision making, it is a problem of incentives not aligning across time frames or between present and future selves. In order to find solutions to such dilemmas it seems more useful to look to micro-economics and the design of incentive structures that align incentives across time scales than to ways to improve the rationality of decisions. The steps I take to acquire chocolate are perfectly rational, the problem is with the conflicts in my incentive structure.
I suspect there's a bit of both going on but I'm fairly sure it's not as dramatic a discounting as an 80% to 1% change (I realize your numbers were only illustrative of the idea). My feeling based on introspection of the decision making process when making a choice that favours short term gain over the more 'rational' longer term choice is that I am still fully aware of the negative consequences, I just discount them heavily.
If there's one area where my judgements are distorted it is in my estimate of how likely I am to be able to 'make up' for present choices in the future. I think this is a fairly universal phenomenon and is also reflective of conflicts between present and future selves - I may eat the chocolate bar and commit my future self to exercise or a healthier eating regime but I am far too trusting of my future self and consistently underestimate his incentive to renege on any commitments I attempt to bind him to in the present.
In my personal history I have an unusually explicit example of present/future self conflict. When I was at university I made short term decisions which I explicitly justified to myself and others on the basis that I was making choices that my future self would have to pay for but that I anticipated my future self being a person who my present self would have no qualms about taking advantage of. I was aware of the fact that political views tend to move further to the right with age, as best expressed by the line "Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." and as a young liberal anticipated an older and wealthier conservative self who might not believe in wealth transfer. By taking out student loans I could commit my future self to a wealth transfer that suited my purposes at the time but that my future self would likely not approve of.
As it turns out, I was at least partially right about where my political views would move (though of course if I met my younger self now I would attempt to point out the many rational reasons why my views now are in fact more correct, and the many ways in which his understanding was overly simplistic). Overall I don't begrudge my younger self the choices he made however, though that may only be because the commitments did not prove to be overly burdensome.