In this video, the professor attempts to explain how the course's motivation of temporal discounting makes (what strikes me as) a pretty extravagant assumption.
Now, if you think about your future preferences, there's a question on how to think about the fact that your future self wants something different than your current self? For example, if I want to exercise a lot and I also like to sit on the couch and watch TV a lot, now my current self wants to exercise a lot in the future. My future self wants to sit on the couch. Now the question is...when you think about welfare and so on, which self should we respect? And one assumption that's built in here is to say my current self has certain plans for the future, and it's their preferences that I'm using to maximize. I know that my future self wants other things. But in some sense, I'm assuming I know that my current self knows better. The utility function that counts is the current one, not the future one. And so then I respect that one and I'm trying to maximize it subject to what my future selves will choose in trying to maximize their own preferences.
But in some sense, you're exactly right. You could say on one hand, I might like to tax potato chips, because I know in the future I'm going to eat too many potato chips. That's good for me. But there's a future version of myself who would love to eat potato chips. That self would be really unhappy. Now you get very tricky questions of welfare like who are we to say that the current self is different or should get priority over the future self? The future self will really be unhappy. So there are different views on this. Some people, including Matthew Rabin, David Laibson, and so on, would sort of say, what counts is the current self, or a self that chooses for the future. That's sort of the virtue of self and so on. We should use that for welfare evaluation. That's an assumption. There are other people who would argue that no, like, there are all sorts of selves who want different things. So is it good to tax potato chips? Maybe or maybe not, because some selves are better off and some selves are worse off, and how do we ever aggregate across those different selves? So you get very tricky questions. But here for our purposes what we're going to do is say the current self is essentially disrespecting future utility functions and preferences in its own maximization problem. That is to say, I have a utility function right now and discounting function that tells me how I want to aggregate my future utility over time. That is what I want. And then I optimize that with respect to essentially constraints which are coming from my future selves' utility functions.
(minor revisions to the original quote have been made for clarity, the original is at the video link)
Perhaps the above examples are loaded with some negative social preconceptions associated with failing to exercise or eating lots of potato chips, which extend beyond the health outcomes already present in the selves' utility functions, so that we may come to trust the current self just because we already agree with the conclusion. A possibly less-loaded example is inspired by Esther Dyson in the book Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss.
Ask yourself, "Would you say yes if this [conference] were next Tuesday?" It's so easy to commit to things that are weeks or months out, when your schedule still looks uncluttered.
I guess there are multiple possible interpretations of this scheduling advice, but I think one at least relates to dynamic inconsistency, in which a current self risks overcommitting to attending events relative to the preferences of the corresponding future self, because, as we might naturally want to frame it in this example, the current self risks not paying enough respect to the future self's temporal discounting.
The fear is that if the source of the identification of the true self with the current self in some cases and the future self in other cases is not grounded either in the free will of the individual or in economic rationality, then there may be a crevice through which authoritarianism could be propagated parallel to Isiah Berlin's criticisms of early, naïve conceptions of positive liberty built on non-temporal notions of an individual's true self.
I'd like to know in more detail what the main arguments are in both camps. Have the arguments here been in dialog with the conversations evolving in the philosophy of liberty over the past several decades? Would such a course's presentation of temporal discounting change much if it were to make the opposite assumption (the assumption that the current self shouldn't be granted special privileged status just in virtue of being the current self), i.e., would the distinction between exponential discounting and quasi-hyperbolic discounting even be possible?
