Rationally Speaking #158 - Dr. George Ainslie on "Negotiating with your future selves"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ever make a plan to diet, or exercise, or study, and then -- when the scheduled hour rolls around -- decide, "Nah, I'll just put it off another day"? If you said "no," I don't believe you! This episode features behavioral psychiatrist (and economist) George Ainslie, who demonstrated the existence of this ubiquitous phenomenon in human willpower, called hyperbolic discounting, in which our preferences change depending on how immediate or distant the choice is. George and Julia discuss why hyperbolic discounting exists, and how it can be modeled as a negotiation between your current self and your future selves. In the process they explore some of the benefits and risks of this "intertemporal bargaining" approach to willpower, and how it relates to philosophical thought experiments such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and Kavka's Toxin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at n.ycceptics.org.
0:30.8	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.3	I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me is today's guest, Dr. George Ainsley.
0:46.3	He is a research psychiatrist at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center and also a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
0:54.0	He's published several books, and the focus of his research and of those books has been
0:59.2	human motivation and willpower, and specifically this struggle that all of us face from time to time
1:07.6	or on a regular basis, struggle between how we wish we behaved on the one hand
1:14.0	and how we actually behave on the other.
1:17.0	So that's going to be the jumping off point for today's episode.
1:20.4	George, welcome to the show.
1:22.1	I'm glad to be here with you.
1:23.9	So just to orient our listeners,
1:27.3	I presume that everyone listening to this show can identify with this phenomenon in which, for example, it's Sunday and you're thinking about what you're going to do tomorrow and you decide, okay, tomorrow after work, I'm going to go straight to the gym.
1:43.3	And yeah, maybe it'll be a little unpleasant, but it's totally worth it because then I'll be getting in shape and I'll be healthy and getting fit and so on.
1:51.9	And then Monday rolls around. It's the end of the day.
1:55.8	And suddenly it doesn't feel so worth it anymore to go to the gym.
1:59.5	Suddenly it feels much more worth it to go home
2:01.7	and kick back with some Netflix. So what's happened here is there's this change in your
2:08.6	preferences where your preferences on Monday about gym versus Netflix are different from what your preferences
2:16.2	had been on Sunday about that Monday choice.
2:19.5	And also, much of the time, they're different from your preferences on Tuesday about what you wish you had chosen on Monday.
	...

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