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Esar comments on A cure for akrasia - Less Wrong
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I concede that, but I thought people would enjoy this and open thread stuff typically gets buried in 15 minutes or so.
Anyway, here's what there is to think about: 1) Sorensen's solution is paradoxical: if you get an overwhelming (utility wise) amount of money for being akratic, you can't be akratic. So long as you have $1000 (or however much) in Sorensen's fund, it's impossible to commit an (actually as opposed to contrafactually) akratic action.
2) Sorensen probably didn't get any money in the mail, because his solution is obviously silly. But why? It's not hard to tweak the scenario beyond practice but within reason to counter objections about long-tem utility. How do we explain the silliness of this solution?
3) Another (also funny) article in response to this counters that Sorensen's solution isn't silly at all, but rather one that we regularly practice: when we encounter ourselves behaving akratically, we often tell ourselves stories about how we're not distractible, but spontaneous, not mean, but honest, not lazy, but contemplative. We just reevaluate the akratic behavior so that it seems to have a higher utility, and so choosing it is not akratic. Is this true? And if so, is this practice irrational? It obviously seems so, but its irrationality is as hard to explain as the irrationality of Sorensen's solution.
Yes. And one of the reasons why open threads get buried so fast is that people post open-thread level things as separate articles.
Thus, the purpose of my downvote is to make it easier for people to cooperate in this Prisonner's Dilemma.
Except that since he'll never refund the money, the action is still akratic. And even if he does pay out, anything that costs you more than $1,000 is still akratic. It's clever word games that relies on our knowledge that he won't refund the money (because he said so, but also because it pattern-matches to an obvious scam)
He wouldn't even accept the money, much less refund it. It's just a philosophy paper, intended to point out (in an amusing way) a problem or paradox in our understanding of practical reasons.
But in the scenario that he (humorously) sets up, he would refund the money if asked, but the fact that you get $1000 for doing something akratic makes it non-akratic (i.e. because the utility of the akratic action is no longer outweighed, once you take the refund into account).
I suppose then my issue is that I find the problem/paradox trivial to solve, because if you just write out an actual logical flow chart, there's no individual step that runs in to problems. It's clever word play, but there isn't any actual substance behind it.
It's not actually a paradox, because the refund is guaranteed in advance (either you'll do something akratic because everyone does, or he'll use the paradox logic to weasel out of paying). Regardless of which branch you're on, the actual value of the payout is now effectively 0 - if you know you'll get it inevtiably then getting it now is a trivially small improvement, and if you'll never get it, then... you'll never get it. So no paradox emerges, and the action remains akratic.
Put another way: At best, you've simply regained your money, and thus gained +$0.00. Your own failure to be akratic would, itself, be akratic... and... okay... that reasoning produces a completely different and actually viable paradox, but it still simplifies out to "you'd have to be stupid to take this offer" :)
I don't think you've understood the article: if you have $1000 with Sorensen, you cant' do anything akratic. It's impossible. Which isn't to say your behavior changes at all, it just can't be called akratic anymore.
If you lost well over a thousand dollars through weakness of will by some other mechanism, that would still be akratic.
I don't think you understood my point: You're NOT fixing any actual aspect of your life by spending $1,000, so saying you don't have akrasia is clearly wrong, or else you're using a fairly stupid definition.
Also, Alicorn's point, which I raised twice before.
That is the point of Sorensen's article.
... the point of his article is that you can waste $1,000 doing something that doesn't work?
The point of his article is that we run into an absurdity so long as we understand akrasia to be 'knowingly acting against your self interest' (or some equivalent variation thereof). Suppose I have before me actions A and B, and I judge that A has greater utility. Then I do B.
If this is my problem, we can as easily solve it by raising the utility of B (until my doing B instead of A is no longer irrational) as we can by lowering the utility of B until it is no longer tempting. But it's manifestly absurd to think that I can cure akrasia by raising the utility of B (as Sorensen ironically recommends). Yet nothing about our understanding of akrasia explains this absurdity.
So it must be that our understanding of akrasia is faulty. That's the point of the article.