I have been playing around with life hacking ideas inspired by hyperbolic discounting.

One idea that seems to have worked reasonably well is was the idea that I could get to bed on time better if my computer simply switched itself off at a certain time, with absolutely no way (that I am capable of executing!) to make it work until the morning. I found and paid for a piece of software that does this - isurveillance shutdown timer. Unfortnately, this seems to have just shifted my late night computer use to my android mobile device, though gaming sessions that last till 5am are a thing of the past. 

So, I'd like an android app that shuts down your (rooted) android phone if it is ever detected on within a prespecified time window on a particular day - e.g. between 11pm and 6am, with no way for the user to circumvent the shutdown. If the user restarts the phone, it should shut down again immediately when it finds out that the time is not within the specified window. 

I have looked for something like this on Google Play, however most offerings will shut down the phone *once*, but it will stay on if you switch it on again. 

LW being a community of tech-savvy people, I was wondering whether anyone was interested in building such an app? It probably isn't hard to do if you are already an android developer, and I think it would really improve my life, and possibly the lives of other people. You could even make it a paid app - I'd pay. In fact I will commit to paying $50 for the app if someone develops this app and it works as described. If the community finds it useful, I'd expect there'd be some karma in it too. Alternatively if anyone can *find* such an app, I'd be extremely grateful. 

A more advanced version of this would be to lock the phone into "emergency calls only" mode within a specific time window. I don't know how hard that would be to pull off. 

This idea might even be good enough to turn into a business - millions of people around the world have the same problem. The requirement to root the device obviously puts something of a dampener on the viability of a business, there may be legal issues with rooting devices as part of a business. 

Humans have a value function which is inconsistent over time, discounting roughly with proportion to distance in the future, so that we discount more steeply as an event approaches. This is why we stay up late, ignore the alarm, put off work until close to a deadline, et cetera et cetera.

Yet hyperbolic discounting appears to go away as we mature. I believe this is a result of cognitive mechanisms for maintaining consistency. Cognitive dissonance is painful for us. The consistency mechanism seems to explain some of our irrational behaviour, such as the sunk cost fallacy. It provides a way for us to stick with plans which we previously made, avoiding preference changes due to hyperbolic discounting.

If a hyperbolically discounting agent could perfectly self-modify, it would fix its hyperbola to a specific point in time, resulting in an agent whose discounting would flatten out over the remainder of its life. Perhaps our consistency mechanism approximates this result; but far from perfectly. We can also resolve the inconsistency in a different way, by accepting a specific discount rate. Rather than forcing our future selves to conform to our present preferences, resulting in a gradually flattening function, our present selves may instead accept our future preferences in order to resolve the inconsistency.

Given the difficulty of forcing our future selves to accept a flat distribution, we accept that we will steeply discount in the future as we do in the present. This resolution is popular in some circles; we are often told to "live in the present" or "seize the day". In the extreme case, there is the belief (often associated with mystics) that the present moment is infinitely more important than anything else; the discount factor has collapsed to 0. While this view is intellectually coherent, it seems to be biologically impossible; we will keep taking actions based on future consequences even if we think we are only doing what we desire in the moment. Nonetheless, I suppose we can approach very high discount factors.

Based on this model, my suspicion is that we can approach any discount factor as a self-consistent equilibrium-- it is possible that we learn to make and keep very long-term plans, approximating a very low discount, but it is also possible that we learn to live in the present, or learn anything between these two. The consistency mechanism will want to find a fixed point, but which fixed-point we reach will depend on factors outside these mechanisms.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/07/prepared-to-wait-new-research.html

The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.

I was reading TV Tropes on Hell, and it occurred to me: If your discounting was sufficiently hyperbolic, or indeed plain exponential with a low enough time preference, it would in some sense be rational to take a literal Faustian bargain. The integral to infinite time of some constant amount of torture per unit time, discounted exponentially or hyperbolically, is finite; enough worldly power and pleasure would outweight it. 

But this clashes rather strongly with my intuition. Notice that the argument doesn't depend on hyperbolic discounting; no preference pumping is involved. It works just fine with exponentials and a high decay constant. Or, if the worldly pleasures were strong enough, a low decay constant, that is, a high time preference, such as (I assume) most LWers have. For example, would you take eternal torture for a guarantee of living until the heat-death of the universe, 10^130 years from now, with all the refinements of Fun Theory along the way? Intuition says no, infinity being infinity, but then again intuition is notoriously bad at dealing with very large and very small numbers. If I calculate the thing in time-discounted utilons, it seems to me that my decay constant has to be very tiny indeed for me to care about what happens at the end of *10^130* years. 

So should I discard my intuition, and take such a bargain if Mephistopheles should suddenly turn up? (Noting that in 10^130 years, I might learn a thing or two about getting out of such difficulties...) Or alternatively, should I stop discounting future utilons? 

“Beware of WEIRD psychological samples” because results derived from them may reflect the specific sample more than any kind of generalized truth. And LessWrong has generalized hyperbolic discounting out the wazoo. (See the tags akrasia and discounting.) Hyperbolic discounting is bad, of course, because among other things it leaves on vulnerable to preference reversals and inconsistencies and hence money-pumping.

But isn’t it odd that for a fundamental fact of human psychology, a huge bias we have spent a ton of collective time discussing and fighting, that it doesn’t seem to lead to much actual money-pumping? The obvious examples like the dieting or gambling industries are pretty small, all things considered. And online services like BeeMinder specifically devised on a hyperbolic discounting/picoeconomics basis are, as far as I know, useful but no dramatic breakthrough or silver bullet; again, not quite what one would expect. Like many other heuristics and biases, perhaps hyperbolic discounting isn’t so bad after all, in practice.

Ainslie mentions in Breakdown of Will somewhere that financial incentives can cause people to begin discounting exponentially. What if… hyperbolic discounting doesn’t really exist, in practice? If it may reflect a failure of self-control, a kind of teenager trait, one we find in younger (but not older) populations - like university students?

Abstract:    

This Article presents two new arguments against “discounting” future human lives during cost-benefit analysis, arguing that even absent ethical objections to the disparate treatment of present and future humanity, the economic calculations of cost-benefit analysis itself - if properly calculated - counsel against discounting lives at anything close to current rates. In other words, even if society sets aside all concerns with the discounting of future generations in principle, current discounting of future human lives cannot be justified even on the discounters’ own terms. First, because cost-benefit analysis has thus far ignored evidence of rising health care expenditures, it underestimates the “willingness to pay” for health and safety that future citizens will likely exhibit, thereby undervaluing their lives. Second, cost-benefit analysis ignores the trend of improved material conditions in developed countries. As time advances, residents of rich countries tend to live better and spend more, meaning that a strict economic monetization of future persons values the lives of our expected descendents above those of present citizens. These two factors justify “inflation” of future lives that would offset, perhaps completely, the discount rate used for human life. Until regulators correct their method of discounting the benefits of saving human lives in the future, the United States will continue to suffer the fatal costs of underregulation, and agencies will remain in violation of legal requirements to maximize net benefits.

Link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1845504

Paper (PDF): SSRN-id1845504.pdf

Via: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/dont-apply-positive-discount-rates-to-human-lives.html