Meghan Sullivan
speaker
520 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2017
last heard Jun 2017
Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So if you're gonna be rational, you have to have the same preferences about both.
You can't arbitrarily care more about the future that you're missing out on than the past.
That's a kind of arbitrariness argument against past discounting.
Another argument, and this is one my friend Preston Green and I wrote up in a paper in Ethics that came out last summer.
A lot of people assume that discounting past experiences could never lead you to make bad trade-offs in the future.
But that's a a bad assumption.
That assumption doesn't hold up because there are lots of cases where if you're tempted to discount the past and you're using other rational planning strategies, the combination of your strategies are going to mean that you make some bad trade-offs.
So in our paper against time bias, we came up with two examples of this.
Tom Doherty, who's at Cambridge, also came up with a really interesting argument of people who discount the past and as a result make some trade offs that mean they end up doing less well than if they hadn't done it.
So I think that we can find these parallel arguments and if you take these as good reasons to not be near biased, then they really push you to just be completely temporally neutral.
Yeah, so let me give you actually a really concrete example.
And this is something that there has been some work um by social psychologists on, where somebody who is we can call past neutral doesn't discount their past experiences, might end up doing a lot better than somebody who discounts their past.
Suppose that you've you're riding your bike and a driver is texting and being neglectful and hits you.
And now you're in the hospital.
You're gonna sue this driver, not only for your medical bills, but also for your pain and suffering.
You've gotta set a figure on how much your pain and suffering is worth.
Here's a question.
Should you set the figure while you're still miserable in the hospital, or should you wait until you get home and you're on the mend to set the figure?
Turns out there's good evidence from social psychology.
That you're gonna ask for less money if you wait until you go home.
Showing 261–280 of 520 · page 14 of 26
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