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
Good.
Good.
So you're deciding whether or not you're gonna take up smoking.
And you know if you take up smoking you got an eight percent chance of developing lung cancer at some point in your life, probably in the really distant future.
And you say like, eh, you know, I'll play those odds, I really wanna be a smoker.
Before you light up the first cigarette,
Perform the following thought experiment to make sure you're really comfortable with the odds.
Imagine that tomorrow I was going to enter you into a lottery.
You've got a ninety two percent chance of winning the lottery and an eight percent chance of losing it.
If you win the lottery, you get to live out the rest of your life as a smoker without any likelihood of developing lung cancer.
If you lose the lottery, you're gonna immediately develop lung cancer, have to go through the really onerous treatments, have your family go through the really difficult process of watching you endure these treatments.
Let's suppose we'll just take death off the table.
You'll just have to go through all of the really horrific treatments that accompany lung cancer, and then eventually you'll get better and you'll be able to live out the rest of your life normally.
Would you be willing to enter that lottery right now?
If the answer is yes, then you are really comfortable with the odds.
It's the probabilities that are deciding what your preference is.
But if you're not, if we keep the probabilities the same, but we move the event closer in time and your preferences change, then you're being time-biased.
And I think in a lot of these cases, like, you know, forget about the lung cancer example.
For the retirement example, I say like, imagine getting that money.
that you saved.
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