People lose control and act impulsively all time. It is important to forgive ‘em. If you never act impulsively then you seem humorless, uptight, officious, bureaucratic. When professionals act impulsively we wonder: should let this guy steer the ship? One scheme to temper impulses is to smooth things a bit using a group. When your managerial team act [...]
A little article on the idea that behavioral change can be achieved by raising the stakes. This is an idea that economists and lawyers like; so it’s unsurprising that the boffins referenced include one of each. To my mind and as a fan of the work on hyperbolic discounting this is just another example of [...]
So I was inordinately fascinated by a paragraph in Schelling’s paper “Enforcing Rules on Oneself”. This is a paper about personal rules, i.e. the rules we all adopt to reign in our behavior against the pest that is hyperbolic discounting. Since Schelling’s wrote the paper for a law journal he needed to outline why the usual tools of [...]
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Here’s a nice clean example of “preparation of emotion” – one of Anisle’s broad categories for counter acting our hyperbolic nature. I have a friend who taught me a rule. To chuckle quietly when every anybody says “just.” As in “The job is just dealing with the machine crashes.” It’s a good rule. In [...]
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
This post is a table of contents for finding the postings I’ve written over the years on the topic of pico-economics, i.e. George Ainslie’s model of what a horribly difficult time we have with impulse control. This posting explains how tremendously overvalue temptations that are closer v.s. further away; and how this annoys us. Experiments [...]
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Self control freaks can now monitor their behavior while they sleep, meanwhile the control freaks are thinking evil thoughts about applying this to all their subordinates.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
When hanging out in the world of ideas created by Ainsle’s work Emerson’s cliche “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” offers a nice perspective. Possibly Emerson’s point was that given a larger mind you can house yet more than one hobgoblin. In related news I see that when they cleaned up the [...]
Monday, September 10, 2007
I continue to be fascinated by Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will; which argues that the core challenge of our existence is a struggle between our various preferences over time. Our long-term and near-term preferences are continually churn to create inconsistencies of behavior that are totally irrational. We tackle this frustrating inconsistency by attempting to strike bargains [...]
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.” One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life. I’d not noted before that the evolved animal [...]
i’m enjoying reading “Breakdown of Will” by Ainslie. One name his work goes by is pico-economics. If that name is not intended to be sarcastic then it’s at least ironic given that Economics is currently king of the social sciences and Ainslie’s model underminds the king’s legitamacy. The market stalls of pico economics are set [...]
Fresh Links…