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

But then some like smart ass comes to you and says, Well, look, I mean, you know this all isn't gonna go on forever.

Eventually, like four billion years there's gonna be heat death of the Milky Way galaxy or the universe is gonna eventually end.

Does that mean that your none of your projects are meaningful?

Most of us think like, no, that's not like, you know, it's interesting thing to think about sometimes, but that doesn't really pose any deep meaning threat to my life.

Now, it's funny like we like Scheffler kind of makes fun of people that think that way in his book, but actually some really serious thinkers throughout history have thought that the fact that this isn't gonna go on forever

is something that causes a crisis of meaning.

So it's like Tolstoy in his uh his autobiography talks about finding himself at age fifty at this kind of existential precipice because he realized even though he was a world-renowned author and wealthy, had like eight children, like a wonderful family, eventually everything that he was trying to do on earth would be totally forgotten.

And

once he realized that he reports like he just couldn't find any value in any of his activities anymore.

And in fact this is when he like became a monk and like started giving away his possessions and had major friction with his family.

So some people do like take the long view of how their lives are meaningful and don't have this kind of near bias about meaning.

But the fact that they don't have this time bias, like for Tolstoy, had really devastating consequences.

It meant that there was lots of ways he just couldn't find value in his life anymore.

So philosophers, psychologists, economists have focused a lot of attention on near bias.

Only really philosophers have been interested in our tendency to discount the past.

There are a couple psychologists who've actually tried to measure how much we don't care about experiences in our past, but there's actually very little research on like the psychology behind how we value past events.

I think all of these time biases should be treated as a family.

And if you're using one theory of rationality to argue that

that people should be saving money for retirement, that near bias is irrational.

Then you should look and consider whether that same theory of rationality says that you should care just as much about your past as you care about your future.

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