Meghan Sullivan

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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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Elucidations · Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases · 11 Jun 2017 podcast

There's pretty good evidence from social psychology, especially working on disability, that shows we're pretty crappy at making judgments about whether or not our preferences will be satisfied after a big change.

So there's lots of evidence that people who experience permanent paralysis think that before the

uh event happens, they're gonna be really miserable and that their life will not have as much happiness anymore in the future going forward.

But as a matter of course, after they enter the paralyzed condition, after a certain recovery period, they find that their levels of satisfaction with their lives and levels of well-being are pretty similar to what they were before they became disabled.

That's good evidence to think like also you shouldn't really trust your personal judgments based on like imagination and projection about what a big experience is gonna be like for you, but instead you should look at the evidence of what people similar to you have uh have experienced.

So a couple of them we've already hit on in this podcast.

One is

When you decide to discount some distant future event and make sure you're doing it because you assign low probability and not just because it's happening a long time from now.

So make sure you're keeping separate your preferences about risk or your taste for risk from how far in the future some event's gonna happen.

I think once we do that, a lot of us should be putting a lot more money in our retirement accounts.

If you're a healthy person with a healthy love of money and you perform this kind of thought,

experiment, you're gonna think, man, I should be saving a lot more and I should get more information about how my money could grow.

Another one, which we've already kind of touched on, is if you're trying to get compensated for something that's a painful experience or bad experience that's already happened in the past, try to vividly imagine or remember what it was like to be in that experience when you set the figure on it, and don't just rely offhand on how you currently uh think about that experience, because probably you are discounting it, but you shouldn't be.

Not gonna be a super weird

way to live, it's just gonna be something that causes you to pause and employ this kind of heuristic.

As a matter of course, like our emotions are really sensitive to timing.

So if you find out that your painful surgery is happening tomorrow rather than several months from now, you're gonna be really anxious about it.

You're gonna have like really strong feelings about that knowledge or about the scheduling.

That doesn't mean that you should care less about surgeries scheduled several months from now than you do about ones that are gonna happen tomorrow.

It just means that you've gotta learn to manage your time-biased emotions.

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