Ok I'll react. I for one have wound up following my desires as they are.
I mean, far too often I could see the two sides of a coin, like "chocolate tastes good | that's going to ruin my health", and realize that indeed, the first part was stronger than the second one. Since I incur a net willpower cost for the weaker side, whenever I try to fight off the stronger impulse, I slowly but surely learned the habit to instantaneously bow and submit to my impulse, rather than wasting resources on what would turn out to be a lost cause in the end, anyway.
At first I did it only on those occasions where it didn't look like it was even relevant to push myself. Then I expanded the set of occasions where I'd submit, again and again. I could often see how it was either harmless to concede ground, or irrelevant to keep it. And now I'm pretty much ridden with akrasia and laziness.
The state where you follow your "rational" judgment is more fragile, and artificial than the one where you follow the natural impulse. It's easier to fall out of it than back in. And if you don't train it constantly, and if you grow into the habit of yielding, then you'll get even better at repeating the same pattern next time.
I'll give just one more general example, that is when you think something along the lines of "oh, I want X, but I shouldn't; ok, I'll just do a little bit of it, then I'll stop", where X can be a lot of things, like this apple pie, gaming time while you're studying, getting a wee bit too close to that special person you can't be close to, etc. Well, if it's already difficult to fight it off at first, it won't get easier once you've had a bit of it. To the contrary. And if you're sophisticate enough to generalize past experiences, pleasurable ones, then any such "mistake" will help you choose the impulse over the rational choice, next time.
On an absolute sense, I'd tend to believe that something fragile needs to be protected. Also, not a few of the actions I'll take against my best judgment, I know to be nefarious in one way or another.
Yes, I damn want those things I think I shouldn't want. In some cases, to the point where I'll actually defend them against myself or other's interference, even though I know that if I have to be consistent with my own values, I shouldn't, rather should I fight them. That , in general, sounds almost like a plea for help from the part of a mind that knows it's right, but too fragile to survive once it's made a few mistakes and has to compete with something much more vivid. If we end up saying that whatever side wins oneself over, is right, as long as you like it, then it's only selecting for the strongest of both opponents. Does might make right ?
Does this look any different in the light of hyperbolic discounting?
The funny thing about regret is that it's better to regret something you have done than something that you haven't done. I feel very fortunate in that I regret vanishingly little of what I have done - but I regret so much of what I haven't done.
Inspired in part by Robin Hanson's excellent article on paternalism a while back, and in response to the various akrasia posts.
In C.S. Lewis's fourth Narnia book, The Silver Chair, the protagonists (two children and a Marsh-wiggle) are faced with a dilemma regarding the title object. To wit, they met an eloquent and quite sane-seeming young man, who after a while reveals that he has a mental disorder: for an hour every night, he loses his mind and must be restrained in the Silver Chair; and if he were to be released during that time he would become a giant, evil snake (it is a fantasy novel, after all). The heroes determine to witness this, and the young man calmly straps himself into the chair. After a few moments, a change comes over him and he begins struggling and begging for release, claiming the other personality is the false one. The children are nonplussed: which person(ality) should they believe? And (a separate question) which should they help?
In the book this dilemma is resolved by means of a cheat*, but we in real life have no such thing. We do, however, have an abundance of Silver Chairs, in the form of psychotropic drugs from alcohol to hallucinogens to fancy antidepressants and antipsychotics. Of course not every person who takes such drugs is in a Silver Chair situation, but consider for instance the alcoholic who insists he doesn't have a problem, or the paranoid schizophrenic who fears that any drug is an attempt to poison him. Now we as observers or authorities may know from statistics or even from their personal histories that the detoxxed/drugged-up versions of these people would be happy for the change and not want to return to the previous state, but does that mean it's right (in a paternalistic sense, meaning for their own good) to force them towards what we call mental health?
I would say it is not, that our preference for one side of the Silver Chair over the other is simple bias in favor of mental states similar to our own. From our places near normality we can't imagine wanting to be in these bizarre mental states, so we assume that the people who are in them don't really want to be either. They might claim to, sure, but why believe them? After all, they're crazy. For two amusing thought experiments in this line which have been considered in detail by others, let the bizarre mental state in question take the values "religious belief", and "sense of humor". For a sobering real-world application, consider the fate of homosexuals until a few decades ago. And then think about how, as Eliezer has said, the future like the past will be filled with people whose values we would find abhorrent.
This idea has internal relevance as well. You could easily consider, for instance, the self introspecting at home who wants to lose weight and the self in a restaurant who wants to order cheesecake as two sides of a Silver Chair**. And I think that view is more helpful than just calling it "akrasia", because it presents the situation as two aspects of your personality which happen to want different things, instead of some "weakness" which is interfering with your "true will". Then instead of castigating yourself for weakness of will, you merely think "I suppose my desire for cheesecake was stronger than I anticipated. When I return to a state where my desire to lose weight is dominant, I shall have to make stricter plans."
Again, I see a bias: we think that the desires (and in fact the entire mental state) which we have while, e.g., sitting alone calmly in a quiet room are the "true" ones, or even the "right" ones in some moral sense, and that feelings or thoughts we have at other times are "lesser" or akrasic, simply because at the time when we're introspecting we can't feel the power of those other situations,† and of course we rightly privilege our calm-quiet thinking for its prowess in answering objective questions. We spend (presumably) the bulk of our lives not engaged in quiet introspection, so why should we defer to what our desires are then?
Of course, one can always say "When I calmly introspect and plan things in advance, I end up happier/more successful than if I were to give in to my impulses". To which I would respond "That's fine. If happiness or success is what you want, and that method is effective, then go for it."‡ My point is that, just as you shouldn't condemn someone else for not conforming to the desires or thought patterns you think they ought to have, much less force them to conform, neither should you condemn yourself. Your utils come from doing what you want, not being happy or successful, or finding the most efficient way to satisfy as many of your desires as possible, or anything else.
This idea also seems to have relevance to the topic-which-shall-not-be-named, but I guess this isn't the time for that.
* Specifically, the chairbound personality invokes the Holy Name of God, which breaks the symmetry. Not a solution many readers of this site would go for, I think.
** That phrasing is admittedly quite awkward; I guess the two sides would be "(sitting) in" and "out" of the chair.
† I once read that brain scans show that one cannot remember the sensation of sex/orgasms in the same way one can remember other more ordinary sensations. That doesn't jive with my personal experience, but if true I think it gives interesting evidence. A related phenomenon sometimes mentioned by poets (and which I have experienced) is that as you fall in love with someone, you actually find it harder to remember what they look like.
‡ One can also object that impulsive desires are incoherent: e.g. hyperbolic discounting. But I would say that incoherence is a property of epistemic systems, i.e. things that must be explained by other things. A desire doesn't need to be explained by anything or agree with anything; it merely is. And paradoxes of wanting both X and !X don't seem to arise (or if they do, you can always kick in some rationality at that point).