because the point is that the total amount of utility over my life stays constant.

I don't think this is a useful approach. A major component of time preference is the fact that future is uncertain.

If you set up the situation such that there is basically no difference between the future and the present (both are certain, known, you yourself don't change, etc.) then yes, reshuffling utility between two otherwise identical points on a timeline is something you could well be indifferent to. However that's very far away from the real life and I thought we were talking about something with practical applications rather than idealized abstractions.

On a personal level, my intuition is not to discount at all, i.e. my happiness in 50 years is worth exactly the same as my happiness in the present.

Do you think you actually behave that way on a system one level?

This still assumes that I have enough savings to live from

No, it does NOT assume that.

Basically you have a zero discount rate for money which you don't need at the moment. How about money which you can use and want to use today, what rate will persuade you to go without?

my intuition is not to discount at all, i.e. my happiness in 50 years is worth exactly the same as my happiness in the present.

If you separate utility discount into uncertainty (which isn't actually a discount of a world state, it's weighting across world-states and should be separately calculated by any rational agent anyway) and time preference, it's pretty reasonable to have no utility discount rate.

It's also reasonable to discount a bit based on diffusion of identity. The thing that calls itself me next year is slightly less me than the thing that calls itself me next week. I do, in fact, care more about near-future me than about far-future me ,in the same way that I care a bit more about my brother than I do about a stranger in a faraway land. Somewhat counteracting this is that I expect further-future me to be smarter and more self aware, so his desires are probably better, in some sense. Depending on your theory of ego value, you can justify a relatively steep discount rate or a negative one.

Hyperbolic discounting is still irrational, as it's self-inconsistent.

Couple of things to throw in there.

First, you can empirically observe real-life discount functions that you can, ahem, bet money on. For example, here.

Second, with respect to "my intuition is not to discount at all", let's try this. I assume you have some income that you live on. How much money would you take at the end of three months to not receive any income at all for those three months? Adjust the time scale if you wish.

In general, you can think of discounting in terms of loans. Assuming no risk of default, what is the interest rate you would require to lend money to someone for a particular term?

I have some questions on discounting. There are a lot, so I'm fine with comments that don't answer everything (although I'd appreciate it if they do!) I'm also interested in recommendations for a detailed intuitive discussion on discounting, ala EY on Bayes' Theorem.

• Why do people focus on hyperbolic and exponential? Aren't there other options?
• Is the primary difference between them the time consistency?
• Are any types of non-exponential discounting time-consistent?
• What would it mean to be an exponential discounter? Is it achievable, and if so how?
• What about different values for the exponent? Is there any way to distinguish between them? What would affect the choice?
• Does it make sense to have different discounting functions in different circumstances?
• Why should we discount in the first place?

On a personal level, my intuition is not to discount at all, i.e. my happiness in 50 years is worth exactly the same as my happiness in the present. I'll take $50 right now over $60 next year because I'm accounting for the possibility that I won't receive it, and because I won't have to plan for receiving it either. But if the choice is between receiving it in the mail tomorrow or in 50 years (assuming it's adjusted for inflation, I believe I'm equally likely to receive it in both cases, I don't need the money to survive, there are no opportunity costs, etc), then I don't see much of a difference.

• Is this irrational?
• Or is the purpose of discounting to reflect the fact that those assumptions I made won't generally hold?
• The strongest counterargument I can think of is that I might die and not be able to receive the benefits. My response is that if I die I won't be around to care (anthropic principle). Does that make sense? (The discussions I've seen seem to assume that the person will be alive at both timepoints in any case, so it's also possible this should just be put with the other assumptions.)
• If given the choice between something bad happening now and in 10 years, I'd rather go through it now (assume there are no permanent effects, I'll be equally prepared, I'll forget about the choice so anticipation doesn't play a role, etc). Does that mean I'm "negative discounting"? Is that irrational?
• I find that increasing the length of time I anticipate something (like buying a book I really want, and then deliberately not reading it for a year) usually increases the amount of happiness I can get from it. Is that a common experience? Could that explain any of my preferences?

I think the value of a Wikipedia pageview may not be fully captured by data like this on its own, because it's possible that the majority of the benefit comes from a small number of influential individuals, like journalists and policy-makers (or students who will be in those groups in the future). A senator's aide who learns something new in a few years' time might have an impact on many more people than the number who read the article. I'd actually assign most of my probability to this hypothesis, because that's the distribution of influence in the world population.

ETA: the effects will also depend on the type of edits someone makes. Some topics will have more leverage than others, adding information from a textbook is more valuable than adding from a publicly available source, and so on.

This can be illustrated by the example of evolution I mentioned: An evolutionary explanation is actually anti-reductionist; it explains the placement of nucleotides in terms of mathematics like inclusive genetic fitness and complexities like population ecology.

This doesn't acknowledge the other things explained on the same grounds. It's a good argument if the principles were invented for the single case you're explaining, but here they're universal. If you want to include inclusive genetic fitness in the complexity of the explanation, I think you need to include everything it's used for in the complexity of what's being explained.

I’m talking about conservation of expected evidence.

Sure, this experiment is evidence against 'all fat, tired people with dry hair get better with thryoxine'. No problem there.

Terminology then. When you said “Thyroxine is very strongly disliked by the healthy controls (they could tell it from placebo and hated it),” it suggests they could identify the active treatment.

Yes, it is kind of odd isn't it? One of the pills apparently made them a bit unwell, and yet they couldn't tell which one. I notice that I am confused.

The people in the study had symptoms.

You're right. I think I should have said "This treatment is harmful to most people".

This is normal...

But that's awful! Once, there was a diagnostic method, and a treatment that worked fine, that everyone thought was brilliant. Then they invented a test, which is very clever, and a good test for what it tests, and the result of that is that lots of people are ill and don't get the treatment any more and have to suffer horribly and die early.

If that's normal then there's something badly wrong with normal. A new way of measuring things should help!

we have to decide which ones are worth considering.

Sure, I'm trying to make a case that this one is worth considering.

it might not be possible to design a study ..

I think the Scottish study with stricter entry criteria for the patient group would do. If that failed, I would be quite surprised.

If someone did the same thing with stricter entry criteria and used desiccated thyroid and titrated doses and it failed I would be so surprised that I would give up.

Seriously, if 'start off with low doses and keep raising the dose until you get a response' is inaccessible to testing, then something is broken.

But in fact, just 'low basal metabolic rate in CFS' would be good evidence in favour, I think. We can work out optimal treatments later.

And if it turned out that there wasn't a subset of CFS patients with high Billewicz scores and low basal metabolic rates, I'd give up. No study needed.

I can’t stress this enough: in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.

At that point, we're all post-modernists aren't we? The truth is socially determined.

science is unreliable but is still better than ancestral wisdom

Science is not unreliable. If I can surprise a physicist or a chemist about something he is sure of, he will be very very interested, and science will quickly rearrange itself around the new fact. It took about five years to completely overturn classical physics and replace it with something we haven't managed to surprise yet, even though everyone knows that the new theories are broken and is actively trying to find things that happen that they don't predict. And classical physics is still damned good in the domains that it used to work in.

There's at least a possibility here that medical science is getting beaten hollow by chiropractors and quack doctors and internet loonies, none of whom have any resources or funding at all.

Even the possibility is enough to make me think that there's something appallingly badly wrong with the methods and structure of medical science.

Hmmm

This piece claims that

...we face a replication crisis in the field of biomedicine, not unlike the one we’ve seen in psychology but with far more dire implications. Sloppy data analysis, contaminated lab materials, and poor experimental design all contribute to the problem.

...Freedman and his co-authors guessed that fully half of all results rest on shaky ground, and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies don’t merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful data whatsoever.