= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RomeoStevens comments on How to become a PC? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (138)
Timeless decision theory: If you choose not to improve now, you'll choose not to improve in all similar circumstances. You certainly don't want to be trying to make dietary and exercise changes at the age of 65 trying to undo decades of a sedentary lifestyle. Future you will always wish that they had started earlier.
This is powerful, especially the final sentence. But what makes it powerful, it seems to me, is the vision of myself at age 65, woefully resigned to laziness and poor health. My being 65 in the picture makes a difference, because it makes it seem that much more pathetic, and that much more too late. Because of that, it seems that the situation at age 65 (given continued laziness from today until then) is not "similar" to the situation today.
To motivate yourself further, imagine yourself as the granpa of steel you're going to become if you do the right thing.
Present-me wishes that past-me had started earlier.
(But as the saying goes, the difference between 1 and 2 is much smaller than the difference between 0 and 1...)
When something similar to this works for me its more that I am dragging my future preferences into the present rather than pushing my present actions into the future. Everyone wants to exercise more later and not now. When I do it now I remember that this makes me more likely to do it in the future.
While this might be a good motivator, it's not quite true. Specifically, your future states (ie 'the future you') are not 'you' in the precise sense that they would need to be in order for TDT to be directly applicable (that is, applicable in the same sense in that it's applicable to Newcomb-like problems). You could make a case for TDT being at least as applicable as it is in the case of acausal cooperation with entities similar to yourself, but I for one have always been somewhat skeptical of that logic.