If you haven't read the book, I again urge you to - there's a lot more to it than just presenting the discount curve, there's a whole theory that sets out how our wacky discounting curve leads to all sorts of behavours like making rules for ourselves.
No, I haven't read the book -- I've just encountered discussions of the discount curve before. And I read the precis and a couple articles available on the site you linked, and find his rules and bargaining model to be massively overcomplicated, compared to what you need to know to achieve actual results. From my POV, it's like he's trying to explain a word processor by discussing pixels, instead of fonts and character buffers.
IOW, his model actively distracts one from knowing anything useful about how the human platform generates the results it gets, or how to make the platform DO anything.
It's like trying to build a model of health by discussing how to work around symptoms, instead of actually curing any diseases. And it perpetuates the notion that you need to (and can) work around your "interests" at the conscious level, instead of simply adjusting the interests directly -- i.e., it's a perpetuation of "far" (extrapolative) thinking in a place where "near" (directly-associative) thinking is desperately needed.
That having been said, there are some things he gets right: we do have conflicting interests, and they do more or less interact in the manner described. It's just that knowing that as an isolated fact, doesn't tell you anything: it's like knowing a thing's emergent properties, but not the rules that generate those properties.
(Also, his ideas about appetite moderation and satiation are interesting, so I do intend to study that further, to see if it leads to anything useful. Likewise some of his thoughts on dissociation.)
if you're actively trying to make a theory of akrasia
I'm not making a theory of akrasia; I've been reverse-engineering fixes for it. That means I've been developing a practical model that supports predictions I can test in myself and my clients, to produce quick results.
That's not quite the same thing as developing an accurate theoretical model. You might say I'm making a street map rather than a terrain map of the same territory: it might not be "accurate" in a literal sense, but it gets people where they want to go.
I'm still a rationalist and interested in truth, but I'm seeking navigational truth rather than topographical truth, and the experimental results that count are whether my clients are accomplishing the things they want to.
The reason I linked to that thoughts-into-action video is that it's a concrete and highly repeatable demonstration of the practical results that my model produces... and it doesn't need anything in Ainslie's model (AFAICT from the precis) to explain how to do it. (You can certainly fit Ainslie's model to it, but I think you'd have a hard time getting Ainslie's model to predict it in advance, or to generate the actual steps of the method.)
And that technique is only the tip of the iceberg -- it's something that I deliberately chose to be a quick-and-easy demonstration that could be done inside of YouTube's 10 minute limit, and which would work on most people if they follow the directions precisely.
It's a little bit of a cheat, in that inducing positive motivation (which is what the technique does) is considerably less useful than reducing negative motivation in practical treatment of chronic procrastination. But my techniques for reducing negative motivation are more complex to teach.
Btw, another critique of the temporal bargaining concept is that, at least in the precis, there's little discussion of negative motivation, which is in my experience is almost always the dominant factor in undesired behaviors.
Certainly, he dabbles in the idea of "credibility injury", but he appears to miss the fact that it's precisely our desire to avoid painful self-image adjustment that generates our worst failures!
The desire to avoiding self-image injury doesn't help us, it actually hurts us... and it's due to a design flaw in the human architecture that I call the "perform-to-prevent bug". (It's not a flaw from evolution's perspective, of course, just from ours!)
To be fair, he does point out that rules and willpower make things worse, but he's missing the self-image injury avoidance as the generator of both the rules and the negative behaviors. (In my work, it's clear that removing the negative motivation and stopping all attempts at using rules and willpower result in eliminating the compulsive behaviors that motivated the desire to use willpower in the first place.)
I suppose, all in all, though, I should say that he's actually doing pretty good for someone who doesn't need to have their model actually fix anyone. ;-)
Related on OB: Priming and Contamination
Related on LW: When Truth Isn't Enough
When I was a kid, I wanted to be like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. He was smart, he could kick ass, and he usually saved the day while Kirk was too busy pontificating or womanizing.
And since Spock loved logic, I tried to learn something about it myself. But by the time I was 13 or 14, grasping the basics of boolean algebra (from borrowed computer science textbooks), and propositional logic (through a game of "Wff'n'Proof" I picked up at a garage sale), I began to get a little dissatisfied with it.
Spock had made it seem like logic was some sort of "formidable" thing, with which you could do all kinds of awesomeness. But real logic didn't seem to work the same way.
I mean, sure, it was neat that you could apply all these algebraic transforms and dissect things in interesting ways, but none of it seemed to go anywhere.
Logic didn't say, "thou shalt perform this sequence of transformations and thereby produce an Answer". Instead, it said something more like, "do whatever you want, as long as it's well-formed"... and left the very real question of what it was you wanted, as an exercise for the logician.
And it was at that point that I realized something that Spock hadn't mentioned (yet): that logic was only the beginning of wisdom, not the end.
Of course, I didn't phrase it exactly that way myself... but I did see that logic could only be used to check things... not to generate them. The ideas to be checked, still had to come from somewhere.
But where?
When I was 17, in college philosophy class, I learned another limitation of logic: or more precisely, of the brains with which we do logic.
Because, although I'd already learned to work with formalisms -- i.e., meaningless symbols -- working with actual syllogisms about Socrates and mortals and whatnot was actually a good bit harder.
We were supposed to determine the validity of the syllogisms, but sometimes an invalid syllogism had a true conclusion, while a valid syllogism might have a false one. And, until I learned to mentally substitute symbols like A and B for the included facts, I found my brain automatically jumping to the wrong conclusions about validity.
So "logic", then -- or rationality -- seemed to require three things to actually work:
But it wasn't until my late thirties and early forties -- just in the last couple of years -- that I realized a fourth piece, implicit in the first.
And Spock, ironically enough, is the reason I found it so difficult to grasp that last, vital piece:
That to generate possibly-useful ideas in the first place, you must have some notion of what "useful" is!
And that for humans at least, "useful" can only be defined emotionally.
Sure, Spock was supposed to be immune to emotion -- even though in retrospect, everything he does is clearly motivated by emotion, whether it's his obvious love for Kirk, or his desire to be accepted as a "real" rationalis... er, Vulcan. (In other words, he disdains emotion merely because that's what he's supposed to do, not because he doesn't actually have any.)
And although this is all still fictional evidence, one might compare Spock's version of "unemotional" with the character of the undead assasin Kai, from a different science-fiction series.
Kai, played by Michael McManus, shows us a slightly more accurate version of what true emotionlessness might be like: complete and utter apathy.
Kai has no goals or cares of his own, frequently making such comments as "the dead do not want anything", and "the dead do not have opinions". He mostly does as he's asked, but for the most part, he just doesn't care about anything one way or another.
(He'll sleep in his freezer or go on a killing spree, it's all the same to him, though he'll probably tell you the likely consequences of whatever action you see fit to request of him.)
And scientifically speaking, that's a lot closer to what you actually get, if you don't have any emotions.
Not a "formidable rationalist" and idealist, like Spock or Eliezer...
But an apathetic zombie, like Kai.
As Temple Grandin puts it (in her book, Animals In Translation):
She is, of course, summarizing Antonio Damasio's work in relation to the somatic marker hypothesis and decision coherence. From the linked article:
Now, we can get into all sorts of argument about what constitues "emotion", exactly. I personally like the term "somatic marker", though, because it ties in nicely with concepts such as facial micro-expressions and gestural accessing cues. It also emphasizes the fact that an emotion doesn't actually need to be conscious or persistent, in order to act as a decision influencer and a source of bias.
But I didn't find out about somatic markers or emotional decisions because I was trying to find out more about logic or rationalism. I was studying akrasia1, and writing about it on my blog.
That is, I was trying to find out why I didn't always do what I "decided to do"... and what I could do to fix that.
And in the process, I discovered what somatic markers have to do with akrasia, and with motivated reasoning... long before I read any of the theories about the underlying machinery. (After all, until I knew what they did, I didn't know what papers would've been relevant. And in any case, I was looking for practice, not theory)
Now, in future posts in this series, I'll tie somatic markers, affective synchrony, and Robin Hanson's "near/far" hypothesis together into something I call the "Akrasian Orchestra"... a fairly ambitious explanation of why/how we "don't do what we decide to" , and for that matter, don't even think the way we decide to.
But for this post, I just want to start by introducing the idea of somatic markers in decision-making, and give a little preview of what that means for rationality.
Somatic markers are effectively a kind of cached thought. They are, in essence, the "tiny XML tags of the mind", that label things "good" or "bad", or even "rational" and "irrational". (Which of course are just disguised versions of "good" and "bad", if you're a rationalist.)
And it's imporant to understand that you cannot escape this labeling, even if you wanted to. (After all, the only reason you're able to want to, is because this labeling system exists!)
See, it's not even that only strong emotions do this: weak or momentary emotional responses will do just fine for tagging purposes. Even momentary pairing of positive or negative words with nonsense syllables can carry over into the perception of the taste of otherwise-identical sodas, branded with made-up names using the nonsense syllables!
As you can see, this idea ties in rather nicely with things like priming and the IAT: your brain is always, always, always tagging things for later retrieval.
Not only that, but it's also frequently replaying these tags -- in somatic, body movement form -- as you think about things.
For example, let's say that you're working on an equation or a computer program... and you get that feeling that something's not quite right.
As I wrote the preceding sentence, my face twisted into a slight frown, my brow wrinkling slightly as well -- my somatic marker for that feeling of "not quite right-ness". And, if you actually recall a situation like that for yourself, you may feel it too.
Now, some people would claim that this marker isn't "really" an emotion: that they just "logically" or "rationally" decided that something wasn't right with the equation or program or spaceship or whatever.
But if we were to put those same people on a brain scanner and a polygraph, and observe what happens to their brain and body as they "logically" think through various possibilities, we would see somatic markers flying everywhere, as hypotheses are being considered and discarded.
It's simply that, while your conscious attention is focused on your logic, you have little interest in attending directly to the emotions that are guiding you. When you get the "information scent" of a good or a bad hypothesis, you simply direct your attention to either following the hypothesis, or discarding it and finding a replacement.
Then, when you stop reasoning, and experience the frustration or elation of your results (or lack thereof), you finally have attention to spare for the emotion itself... leading to the common illusion that emotion and reasoning don't mix. (When what actually doesn't mix, at least without practice, is reasoning and paying conscious attention to your emotions/somatic markers at the same time.)
Now, some somatic markers are shared by all humans, such as the universal facial expressions, or the salivation and mouth-pursing that happens when you recall (or imagine) eating something sour. Others may be more individual.
Some markers persist for longer periods than others -- that "not quite right" feeling might just flicker for a moment while you're recalling a situation, but persist until you find an answer, when it's a response to the actual situation.
But it's not even necessary for a somatic marker to be expressed, in order for it to influence your thinking, since emotional associations and speed of recall are tightly linked. In effect, recall is prioritized by emotional affect... meaning that your memories are sorted by what makes you feel better.
(Or what makes you feel less bad ... which is not the same thing, as we'll see later in this series!)
What this means is that all reasoning is in some sense "motivated", but it's not always consciously motivated, because your memories are pre-sorted for retrieval in an emotionally biased fashion.
In other words, the search engine of your mind...
Returns paid results first.
This means that, strictly speaking, you don't know your own motivations for thinking or acting as you do, unless you explicitly perform the necessary steps to examine them in the moment. Even if you previously believe yourself to have worked out those motivations, you cannot strictly know that your analysis still stands, since priming and other forms of conditioning can change those motivations on the fly.
This is the real reason it's important to make beliefs pay rent, and to ground your thinking as much as possible in "near" hypotheses: keeping your reasoning tied closely to physical reality represents the only possible "independent fact check" on your biased "search engine".
Okay, that's enough of the "emotional decisions are bad and scary" frame. Let's take the opposite side now:
Without emotions, we couldn't reason at all.
Spock's dirty little secret is that logic doesn't go anywhere, without emotion. Without emotion, you have no way to narrow down the field of "all possible hypotheses" to "potentially useful hypotheses" or "likely to be true" hypotheses...
Nor would you have any reason to do so in the first place!
Because the hidden meaning of the word "reason", is that it doesn't just mean logical, sensible, or rational...
It also means "purpose".
And you can't have a purpose, without an emotion.
If Spock didn't make me feel something good, I might never have studied logic. If stupid people hadn't made me feel something bad, I might never have looked up to Spock for being smart. If procrastination hadn't made me feel bad, I never would've studied it. If writing and finding answers to provocative questions didn't make me feel good, I never would've written as much as I have.
The truth is, we can't do anything -- be it good or bad -- without some emotion playing a key part.
And that fact itself, is neither good nor bad: it's just a fact.
And as Spock himself might say, it's "highly illogical" to worry about it.
No matter what your somatic markers might be telling you.
Footnotes:
1. I actually didn't know I was studying "akrasia"... in fact, I'd never even heard the term akrasia before, until I saw it in a thread on LessWrong discussing my work. As far as I was concerned, I was working on "procrastination", or "willpower", or maybe even "self-help" or "productivity". But akrasia is a nice catch-all term, so I'll use it here.