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
And as a matter of fact, as something gets scheduled further and further in the future, it does get less and less your confidence that it's going to occur should get like lower and lower because the future is
open or risky.
And that gets us into some tricky metaphysical questions, but in general it's a good assumption that you should assign lower probability, subjective probability to events that get scheduled further in the future.
And it's totally rational, at least on most mainstream conceptions of rationality, to discount an event based on the likelihood that it happens.
So if you're an American thinking about putting money into your retirement account and you're healthy, you should be more confident that it's going to grow in value than if you're a Greek who's thinking about putting money in the bond market in Greece right now.
Why is that?
Well it's just a lot more volatile bond market in Greece right now.
So it's a lot less likely.
You should be a lot less confident that when you go to make that withdrawal there's gonna be the same amount of money there.
That's totally irrational.
You might think, okay, why don't people save money for retirement?
Why won't these kids wait for the second marshmallow?
Maybe it's not that they're being irrationally near-biased, but maybe they just assign a low probability to that event happening, like the event of them surviving and that money growing in their retirement account, or the event of the experimenter coming back in the room if you're one of Michel's marshmallow kids and actually giving you the second marshmallow.
Yeah, maybe you've been burned by adults before.
If what we're doing when we're not saving money for retirement or waiting for the second marshmallow is just risk discounting, then these puzzles are a lot less interesting because you're just doing, you know, all we have to do is then criticize whether or not you have the right probabilities.
I think when we start to think as philosophers about near bias, uh we need some mental tricks for helping us decide.
Decide whether or not our attitudes are attitudes about time, about when things scheduled in the future, versus risk.
One thought experiment you might do to try to separate the two is something that I call a reverse lottery thought experiment.
So let's suppose, Matt, you're deciding about whether or not you're gonna take up smoking.
Do you are you a smoker?
Showing 121–140 of 520 · page 7 of 26
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