Alex Hollow

There are lots of different things, all of which are called regret. I treat them differently, so I need different names for the different classes of regret. Agentic regret. The sort of regret that you feel when you made a choice that was wrong and you knew it was the wrong choice and you failed as an agent. You knew you should have taken out the trash bins, but you didn’t, and now it’s the next day and you have full bins and no way to deal with them until next week. Hope you don’t need to do anything that produces trash. Bad-randomness regret. You made a choice, and you knew it was a gamble, and you lost, even though the gamble had positive expected value. Even if you know your action had positive value, if you had the information while you made the decision that you had now, you could have made a better decision. If you could have gained the information and you knew that ahead of time, this is agentic regret - failing to gather the information required to make a good decision is a bad decision. Self-knowledge regret. You made a choice, and got what you thought you wanted, but it turns out you didn’t want that thing. This may be revelation regret if you knew that you didn’t know what you wanted. But sometimes this comes as a surprise - you get to the top of that mountain and think “whatever, this sucks, I want to go home”, or you finish that book you’ve been forcing yourself to read and think “whatever, this sucks, I don’t want to be at home”. Temporal-conflict regret. The version of you in the past that made a decision (warning: real philosophy happening, “what is the self?”, panic and flee). That decision was good for them but is bad for you, the version of you that exists now. In other words, some asshole (your past self) did something unkind to you (made a decision that benefitted them at the cost of you). Procrastination is a good example of this. If you spend a day on disposable pleasures at the cost of avoiding your meaningful pursuits, the you who has to