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

You might find yourself in a weird situation when you try to operationalize that or when you try to make it a principle of rational planning, especially because it's gonna conflict with other seemingly plausible principles of rational planning.

So here's an example.

Let's suppose that uh Frank is approaching retirement.

He spent most of his career up until now working on a book and he knows that if he threw himself into the project he could finish it.

But right now he gets little pleasure from the project.

He just doesn't care that much about working on the book.

And he thinks in fact he'd be happier if he just totally abandoned it and he spent the rest of his golden years like playing with his grandchildren or going on vacation with his family.

You can suppose that a life where Frank finishes the book is gonna have more narrative value, it's gonna stick together or like make his life a more coherent story or end on a high note, the note of like successfully completing his project, rather than one where he spends the rest of his life playing children's games and like visiting his relatives.

So you might think like if you care about your life fitting into this coherent narrative, then Frank has

But another principle of rational planning says that rational agents should want their lives going forward to be as happy as possible for them.

And if that's the principle that Frank's following, he should abandon the book.

He knows he won't be very happy if he continues to spend his remaining time trying to finish it.

So which principle should he follow?

He can't both finish the book and abandon the book.

We have to figure out which trumps which, the narrative considerations or

Or what I call like the success considerations, the success meaning like rational agents' lives get happier or are happier when they experience them.

I think if you take these kind of Velomin intuitions really seriously, you're gonna have a hard time answering puzzles like that, or saying like which principle you really should follow.

And th you know, there are iterations of these cases that make it even more complicated.

So for those reasons I think

Well we might have that intuition in like the really abstractly described Velleman case, when we get into the details it's not at all clear that it's rational for us to care about sequencing.

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