My new claim is that akrasia is simply irrationality in the face of immediate consequences. It's not about willpower nor is it about a compromise between multiple selves. Your true self is the one that is deciding what to do when all the consequences are distant.
I question this. I can see how it is true in many cases- when both positive and negative consequences are distant, you can judge them in the same light. But I think the opposite is true- people often underestimate the negative consequences of something until those consequences are staring them in the face.
I mean, if someone believes "I want to be a writer" but does not believe "I want to write," is that akrasia? Or is that just not being self-aware enough? I come down pretty strongly in the latter camp. In cases like that, I wouldn't model procrastinatijng writing as irrationality so much as it is the id responding to the superego- "I know you're caught up in this fantasy, but really, it's not worth it."
It took me, depending on how you count things, a few months to a few years for my "I don't want to do physics" to overcome my "I want to be a physicist." If I hadn't been paying attention and thinking "hm, I don't want to do this. Why don't I want to do this?", I could see myself wasting years trying to satisfy myself in a suboptimal way.
This is a great point. But my position is that the use of self-binding accelerates the possible discovery that your dispassionate current self is wrong about what you want. If you believe you want to be a writer but never write then you're in fact not finding out that you hate writing! Eventually you'll concede that your id is telling you something but you might actually be wrong. It might just be a problem of activation energy, for example.
So I still side with the long-term self. Decide what you want from a distance, commit yourself for some reasonabl...
A year and a half ago I wrote a LessWrong post on anti-akrasia that generated some great discussion. Here's an extended version of that post: messymatters.com/akrasia
And here's an abstract:
The key to beating akrasia (i.e., procrastination, addiction, and other self-defeating behavior) is constraining your future self -- removing your ability to make decisions under the influence of immediate consequences. When a decision involves some consequences that are immediate and some that are distant, humans irrationally (no amount of future discounting can account for it) over-weight the immediate consequences. To be rational you need to make the decision at a time when all the consequences are distant. And to make your future self actually stick to that decision, you need to enter into a binding commitment. Ironically, you can do that by imposing an immediate penalty, by making the distant consequences immediate. Now your impulsive future self will make the decision with all the consequences immediate and presumably make the same decision as your dispassionate current self who makes the decision when all the consequences are distant. I argue that real-world commitment devices, even the popular stickK.com, don't fully achieve this and I introduce Beeminder as a tool that does.
(Also related is this LessWrong post from last month, though I disagree with the second half of it.)
My new claim is that akrasia is simply irrationality in the face of immediate consequences. It's not about willpower nor is it about a compromise between multiple selves. Your true self is the one that is deciding what to do when all the consequences are distant. To beat akrasia, make sure that's the self that's calling the shots.
And although I'm using the multiple selves / sub-agents terminology, I think it's really just a rhetorical device. There are not multiple selves in any real sense. It's just the one true you whose decision-making is sometimes distorted in the presence of immediate consequences, which act like a drug.