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 know, imagine you put a thousand dollars in and it's guaranteed to be worth five thousand dollars in twenty five years, thirty years.

Imagine getting that money tomorrow.

Would you be willing to make the same trade off of like, you know, a cool vacation to Mexico versus five thousand dollars in cold hard cash if the option were presented to you tomorrow?

If the answer is no, then it's the fact that you're not going to get that money for a long way and not the probability of getting the money that's going to matter to you.

So I think like performing this reverse lottery thought experiment is one way we can tell whether or not it's the time variable that's wiggling our preferences or whether or not our it's our comfort with the risk or our subjective probabilities of risk that's doing the that's shaping our preferences.

Yeah, so let's talk about future bias for just a second.

So you have a future bias if you discount events because they already happened.

Uh what do we mean by discount?

I mean just like you value them less.

So we say like somebody discounts their really distant future.

They say like, well if it's this far away I care less about it.

Somebody discounts the past if they think because it's already happened I care less about it.

There are ways of testing this.

You might say, like, do I do this?

Well, Derek Parfitt in Reasons and Persons gives this now pretty famous thought experiment to try to convince you that you do really do this.

Here's my version of the thought experiment.

Let's suppose that you've been in an accident and you wake up in the hospital and you have amnesia.

And the nurse comes in and she says, you know, you've been in an accident, you have amnesia, you're gonna need to undergo a surgery.

You're gonna make a full recovery eventually, but the surgery is pretty painful.

You have to be awake during it, so it's a certain kind of brain surgery.

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