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Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics — LessWrong

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Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests, and is a problem doubtless only too familiar to us all. In his book "Breakdown of Will", psychologist George C Ainslie sets out a theory of how akrasia arises and why we do the things we do to fight it. His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agencies within a single person, an approach he terms "picoeconomics". The foundation is a curious discovery from experiments on animals and people: the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting. We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we al

x Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics — LessWrong Akrasia Frontpage 94 Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics by Paul Crowley 29th Mar 2009 3 min read 86 94 Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests, and is a problem doubtless only too familiar to us all. In his book " Breakdown of Will ", psychologist George C Ainslie sets out a theory of how akrasia arises and why we do the things we do to fight it. His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agenc

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