Ghatanathoah comments on If epistemic and instrumental rationality strongly conflict - Less Wrong

5 [deleted] 10 May 2012 01:46PM

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Comment author: Ghatanathoah 13 May 2012 08:34:22PM -1 points [-]

I think that the fact that people exhibit prudence is evidence for caring about many things that change in salience. For instance, if I'm driving home from work and I think "I need groceries, but I'm really tired and don't want to go to the grocery story," there's a good chance I''ll make myself go anyway. That's because I know that even if my tiredness is far more salient now, I know that having food in my pantry will be salient in the future.

I suppose you could model prudence as caring about different things in different contexts, but you'd need to add that you nearly always care about ensuring a high future preference satisfaction state on top of whatever you're caring about at the moment.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 May 2012 10:15:16PM 0 points [-]

I'm not exactly sure I follow you here, but I certainly agree that we can care about more than one thing at a time (e.g., expectation of future food and expectation of future sleep) and weigh those competing preferences against one another.