I'm a little bothered by the distinction between short and long term thinking, in part because I don't understand it. There are a number of things I don't understand.
1. Causal currents: how much weight can we give to short term decisions causing long term outcomes? I have no idea. I also don't really know how to think specifically about how to measure any of our individual choices with outcomes. For instance, if you chose to drive to work instead of take a train, or, worse, to cheat on your spouse, or something less, to commit money laundering, how does that impact you in the long term--or, in other words, how have some of those decisions, once made, already impacted you/me? I know there are ways to figure some of this out in more clinical settings, with clean and comparable data, and measurable quantifiers. It is also easier to see the "rules" on the margins. I certainly will understand my current predicament well if I'm in jail and the reason I'm there is tied in with illegal activities. That's not totally my concern. My concern is more about the psychological. What result is there, for instance, if all results are self-imposed? Is that possible? To what extent?
2. Another variant--assume all decisions are like markers, or paint. And our lives are like huge, almost infinite, canvasses or paper. Every decision point is some color, and every color comes in varying shades of weight, or intensity. To what extent do we take into consideration the portion of the picture that's visible to us when we make future decisions? Can we see the gash of blue or red behind us and decide to balance it off with some green or yellow? Something light to balance something heavy?
3. Dangerous justification. It occurs to me that freedom is allowing yourself the exquisite capacity to fail.Otherwise, we fall into valleys of self-justification, that is, of always emotionally binding our past decisions with current status, and falsifying causation or lack of causation to maintain comfort, that is, to maintain success, or an image of success, whatever we see that image as personally. I'm not sure getting around this is at all easy, because it is almost as automatic as breathing. But it is possible to detach yourself from yourself and isolate out this behavior, or I wouldn't be able to write this, right? I'm worried it is only possible to see this in other people.
"My concern is more about the psychological. What result is there, for instance, if all results are self-imposed? Is that possible? To what extent?"
ReplyDeleteCould you elaborate on this question? I'm not sure I understand what it's getting at. I'm having trouble understanding the example in (2) as well. Is it talking about the same issue as (1)? In this example, what property of a decision is represented by color? What do you mean by "weight" or "intensity"?
The distinction is that jail or prison is not self-imposed, but a lot of the emotional results that come from our own behavior are, in a sense, self-imposed. I'm thinking here of shame, or pride, or something like this, when we associate our previous actions with an emotion and experience the emotion because we must implicitly believe that our actions fall within the parameters to trigger it.
ReplyDeleteI'm basically wondering whether we have the option to feel a lot of what we feel.
The example in (2) is roughly the same problem. Color, line, texture, and the weight of the line, are all ways to describe the collage of our emotional history, and whether we take it into account when dealing with current emotions and current perceptions. In short, when we evaluate something, how much of the history of previous evaluations plays a role? How much of the history of emotional attachment plays a role in our conclusions (and how, if we do this, does it affect our emotional processing). Color, weight, and intensity are not necessarily distinguishable except to say that emotions come in a variety of sizes and shapes and degrees of permanency.
OK, thanks for clarifying; I think I understand the main question now. As I understand this, you're raising two main issues, actually, both of which are pretty deep questions that as far as I know no one has satisfactory answers to. The first one is "endogeneity of utility", in econ mumbo-jumbo; which, in English, means: to what extent can we adjust our preferences? For example, if things don't go according to our plans, to what extent can we rationalize that "it's all for the best anyway," that maybe what we ended up with is better that what we wanted to have. The second one is, like you said, that of how much of the history of past emotional attachment plays a role in our conclusions. Is this understanding the correct one?
ReplyDeleteYes, I think those two are the most succinct.
ReplyDeleteThe first issue is a Pandora's box. The second one sounds to me like something that could be quite adequately described by a reinforcement learning model.
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