emr comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
A simiar one by Vonnegut:
Tsk, tsk. You don't collect your pension or gold watches, or drink alcohol, etc. You pay someone else your pension, give away a gold watch, and un-drink the alcohol.
He didn't say that time flowed backwards, just the order of major life events. And you'd start out collecting your pension out of the nursing home, and give it up when you start working.
As Jiro and Toggle point out, this isn't time reversal, this is Benjamin Button disease. I think the original short story, much more than the film, portrays this correctly as a tragi-comedy. For example, he's a Brigadier-General, but he gets laughed out of the army because he looks like a 16-year-old.
I wonder about people who think that life would be better lived backwards, or that effect should precede cause. Isn't this the universe telling you "Change your ways" in neon capital letters?
Well, the central thing would seem to be changing aging, which isn't induced by any human actions (although you might say people who live healthier get to age more slowly) - if there's any message from the universe in aging, that message is simply "fuck you for being here".