To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:

What you want is suboptimal. You should want different things.

Work's results compound over time. This is most obviously true for money, but it's also true for other things - your position in the workplace, and (most importantly) your acquired knowledge and skills.

You should want for your past selves to have worked very hard - achieving things that will compound over a great deal of time. Assuming you're relatively young, you should want for your current self to still work pretty hard - compounding still matters - but you can spend a little more time having fun. In comparison to your past, you can enjoy an unprecedented level of goofing off, while spending only a little more time in absolute terms (and time is the ultimate currency). And so on, into the future.

What you want is going to be stamped out over and over into the future, so it should produce a desirable result. "I want immediate gratification now, and maybe I'll work hard later" is going to result in endless goofing off, since you're always trying to get your future self to do the work, then when you become that future self, you punt it further along. "I want to have worked hard in the past, pretty hard now, and slightly less hard in the future" is stable, with the right attitude - if you start slacking off or wasting time, you're not sticking to the curve.

Using myself as an example: when I was younger, I worked super hard to learn C++ (it is not the easiest language in the world to learn, that's for sure). Now I am way more powerful than before, and acquiring further power gets easier and easier (in C++ and related areas like OpenGL - it's easier to learn new things with a solid foundation). If I had goofed off in college more than I did (and I spent a lot of time posting on forums and playing video games) instead of teaching myself the language, I wouldn't have gotten my current job, and I'd be bored out of my skull in grad school somewhere, doing who knows what and living like a monk on an income to match. Ugh. Now, this wasn't an explicit plan of mine (I did it because I thought it was awesome, and it was more interesting than my classes), but it's become The Plan and I'm going to stick with it.

Here is a similar old comment of mine.

If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.

and

DH7: Improve the Argument, then Refute Its Central Point...if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

I would add that the goal of intellectual progress sometimes extends beyond you-the-rationalist, to the (potentially less than rational) person you're arguing with. The goal is not just to "produce" the truth, or to recognize the truth with your own two eyes. The goal is to both locate the truth and convince the other person that it is in fact the truth.

Often, I find myself in the following scenario: Someone says, "X and Y, therefore Z!" And off the bat, I have a good idea of what they're thinking and where the logic goes bad. But in point of fact, they are being loose with semantics, and there exist definitions of X and Y consistent with their original (loose) statements which would imply Z. I could ask them clarifying questions and get them to pin down their position further...but alternatively, I am free to say, "Surely you don't mean this one thing [which they really do mean] because here's how that would go bad. Perhaps you really meant this other thing? Am I understanding you correctly?"

This makes it much easier for people to "back down" from their original position without losing face, because they are framed as not having ever committed to that position in the first place. The reality is that we often have a choice between nailing someone in place and offering them up as a sacrifice to the logic gods -- in which case we don't really win since the logic gods can't actually touch people who don't submit to their power -- or deliberately leaving them untethered, so that they will more willingly adjust to new evidence.

Here it's not so much that I'm constructing the best argument from the corpse of their fully formed argument and striking it down. It's more like encouraging the growth of an adolescent argument in a direction that does not require it to be struck down, in the process striking down the bad argument that the original argument would have grown into, and trying to ensure that my "opponent" doesn't end up getting slain along with the bad argument.

This would be out of place in the above post, but I thought it was worthy of a discussion on Better Disagreement. Because I used to think the way to win was to pin people into logical corners, but if you're goal is partly to convince people, and those people are like most people, then in my (limited) experience, this way works So. Much. Better.

I have a question. This article suggests that for a given utility function there is one single charity that is best and that's the one one should give money to. That looks a bit problematic to me - for example, if everyone invests in malaria nets because that's the single one that saves most lives, then nobody is investing in any other kind of charity, but shouldn't those things get done too ?

We can get around this by considering that the efficiency function varies with time - for example, once everybody gives their money to buy nets the marginal cost of each saved life increases, until some other charity becomes best and all charitable giving switches to that one.

But we don't have a complete and up-to-the-second knowledge of how many lives each marginal dollar will save in every charity, all we have to work with is approximations. In that situation, wouldn't it be best to have a basket of charities one gives to, with more money going to those that save the most lives but not putting all the money on a single charity ?

Or is this consideration completely and utterly pointless in a world where most people do NOT act like this, and most people don't give enough money to change the game, so rational actors who don't have millions of dollars to give to charity should always give to the one that saves the most lives per dollar anyway ?