jhuffman comments on What would you do with infinite willpower? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: D_Malik 03 June 2011 12:22PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (60)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jhuffman 03 June 2011 07:04:10PM 1 point [-]

Right. So it seems the problem I may have with distraction is not that I re-evaluate my priorities on interruption, but that I later think I made the wrong decision about priorities. So I go respond on LW again, despite that I really have to finish this paper by the end of the day. Then at the end of the day, I regret this.

Does willpower help me evaluate priorities more sensibly?

Comment author: Nornagest 03 June 2011 07:08:33PM *  2 points [-]

There's a bit of a gray area in that optimizing time and attention management itself takes time and attention, and so your happiness and accomplishment aren't necessarily optimal in absolute terms after taking the time to work out optimal allocations. But that's a quibble; people very frequently engage in behavior they know at the time to be long-term suboptimal, and when we talk about things like willpower and akrasia we're primarily concerned with minimizing that sort of behavior.

With this in mind, I'd describe willpower as the component of your priority-evaluation algorithm that counteracts present-biased preferences. Hypothetically perfect willpower would mean no temporal discounting, although discounting future possibilities in proportion to probability of occurrence doesn't seem like a failure of willpower to me.