I don't want to discourage you from something that works for you, but this model doesn't fit me very well, and I don't know how well it'll apply to others.
> Usually, bad habits are bad because you do them so often.
Really? I mean it's not a habit if you don't do it repeatedly, but the badness is because of the harm or impact of the action(s), not the frequency. Frequency DOES increase the impact, but whether it's linear or sub- (declining marginal harm) or super- (compounding harm) is going to vary by a lot, depending on circumstance and behavior.
> Future You is also you, your future actions are correlated significantly with your present actions. If your decision algorithm outputs <do bad habit> right now, it is very likely to output <do bad habit> whenever you are in this situation in the future.
The degree and causality of correlation are important here. Your brother isn't you, but his actions on many topics are correlated with yours. You're more likely than random to consume similar amounts of alcohol, for instance.
In my model, Future Me is NOT identical to me - there are similarities, and there is continuity (only in one direction), but there's not actual identity. There are LOTS of decisions that I make differently at different times. Also, I really resent Past Me - he got all the fun, and I have to live with the results.
> But what if you just want to do the bad thing less, but not never?
I think you need to more clearly define "bad" if that's the case. If you want to do bad things but only sometimes, either you're intentionally causing harm (only sometimes), or you're overcategorizing as "bad" something that is actually "good, in moderation". If it's "good for me, bad for future-me", then you need to figure out what a reasonable discount rate is and decide whether it's net-good.
Disagreements about what discount rate should have been used are the primary driver of hatred of Past Me, though I'm pretty sure Future Me will be equally wrong in the other direction..
I view this post through the lens that most bad habits are things like smoking and drinking. Done in sufficient moderation, they are fine, but done too much, and they are destructive.
For example, let's say Alice likes smoking, but know that if she smokes a pack a day it'll be bad for her health. She does some math that decide that 1 cigarette a week is as much health risk as she can afford for the joy of smoking. Or, to make the implementation simpler, let's say 3 packs a year (60 cigarettes per annum).
It's not unreasonable that she might do something like buy 3 packs at the start of the year, and when she's out she's out. It's a simple commitment to say she will buy no more packs, but then give herself freedom to smoke those packs however she wants. It contains the damage, minimizes the risk, and eliminates the difficulty of having zero cigarettes.
Similar solutions can apply to most habits you consider bad: give yourself a bad habit budget, spend the budget how you want, and hold yourself to the budget.
Right.
Another thing I found useful is a voluntary per-occurrence “tax” (e.g. when for each actually smoked cigarette you move a noticeable chunk of money, e.g. $20, somewhere (could be charity, could be just some place “within your own family”)).
It’s a bit more flexible (that’s how I stopped smoking, and I gradually raised the amount (from 10, to 20, to 30 dollars per cigarette, but money were worth more back then)). This exercises the circuits in one’s brain which do not want to spend money (I am not sure that this would work for everyone).
The main weakness of this method is the same as the main weakness of OP. One needs a well-defined event, an act to prevent.
For example, if the bad habit is a “pattern of eating incorrectly”, it might be more difficult to handle in this fashion. What exactly should be decided by the coin toss, or what exactly should trigger the voluntary “sin tax”? With food it might be more difficult to specify, because there are so many ways one might slip… A particular feature (like systematically eating too close to bed time) can be alleviated this way…
Thank you for the feedback. I am also confused about what exactly counts as a "bad habit" and why bad habits are bad (see footnote 1). I think one way of avoiding this confusion and still being able to reason about this argument is to just say that doing the bad habit less is less bad (or maybe "good in moderation"?), and doing the bad habit more is more bad. The point still stands: when your future actions are correlated with your present action, the singular action feels more weighty.
In my model, Future Me is NOT identical to me
I agree that future me is not identical to myself either. I think the correlation is high enough that it matters for me, but might not for everyone.
Disagreements about what discount rate should have been used are the primary driver of hatred of Past Me, though I'm pretty sure Future Me will be equally wrong in the other direction..
Agreed. A similar point that I wish I had included in the OP is that this situation can be seen through the lens of acausal trade between your past and future selves: running something like UDT with respect to choices that will affect your future self, you'll find your present self in better situations because your past self also ran UDT, so you continue with running UDT because of <insert favorite motivation of UDT here>. Importantly, this should work even if you have a high (or higher than you would like) discount rate.
Although I don’t exactly know why? Is this because of increasing marginal costs?
My guess: the worse a thing is, the fewer times you can do it before sustaining severe damage.
One way to think about bad habits is through the lens of decision theory (specifically, correlated decision-making).
Usually, bad habits are bad because you do them so often. Doing a bad thing once or twice, or very infrequently, is often not that bad for you.[1] It's only when you do the bad thing frequently that it becomes a bad “habit” and starts to take a serious negative toll on your life.
This sounds like something we could model with correlated decision-making. Because Future You is also you, your future actions are correlated significantly with your present actions. If your decision algorithm outputs <do bad habit> right now, it is very likely to output <do bad habit> whenever you are in this situation in the future. It would not just be nice, but really great, if your decision algorithm outputted <do good habit> at this particular instance, because then it would be likely to output <do good habit> in most similar situations in the future. Fortunately, you are reading this argument and can integrate it into your decision algorithm! The knowledge that your decisions are correlated makes it much harder to say "just this once" to yourself. When you realize this, you start to feel the gravity of all your decisions being compressed into one, and the current "good habit option" starts to look a lot more appealing.
And as most other people will tell you, this becomes easier and easier to do through the usual mechanisms of habit formation. But I find that thinking this way really helps with the first few initial steps, which are usually the hardest.
But what if you just want to do the bad thing less, but not never? One of the big excuses for indulging in a bad habit (at least for me) is “Well, I don’t want to never do this! It's kind of fun, and adds some pleasure to my life, so let’s do it just this time”. And then the “just this time” ends up being way more times than you’d like it to be. This excuse gets its force because of its kernel of truth. For some bad habits, our preference ordering is actually Do This Occasionally > Do This Never > Do This Often. Luckily, acausal decision theories have a solution to this as well: just roll a die! Choose what fraction you want to cut back on the bad habit by, and any time you feel the urge to do the bad habit, roll the correspondingly-sided die to decide for you.[2] Alternatively, just schedule correspondingly-spaced times where you allow yourself to engage in the bad habit.
This way of viewing bad habits has helped me cut back or eliminate a lot of bad habits. Hopefully, it's a unique enough suggestion that it helps you too!
Edit: There is a closely related idea involving acausal trade between your past, present, and future selves to eliminate problems from having an overly high discount rate. See this comment.
Although I don’t exactly know why? Is this because of increasing marginal costs? Decreasing marginal benefit? Just linearly adding costs because it's net negative every time you do it? Anyhow, this seems to be an intuition that most people share, so I’ll run with it.
If you have a bad habit of gambling, or think you might be prone to one, you should probably just do the alternative listed next.