Original study. Can we have a convention that everyone link to these directly in the main post, please?

Another possibility is that people "might well anticipate substantial change, yet not know how they would change, and thus, just predict the status quo"

To give a specific example: If personality can be modeled over time as a martingale)—meaning that the expected future personality is always equal to the current personality—then it is quite appropriate for participants to provide their current personality as a prediction of their future personality, even if they think that the standard deviation of the martingale is large.

More generally, given the current personality and random variable following the distribution of predicted future personality, the predicted change in personality can be characterized by the expected absolute deviation ) or the expected squared deviation %5E2)). However, study 1 in the paper measured the absolute expected deviation %7C) instead, which is a poor measure. (This limitation of the study is understandable because collecting data on and ) is relatively easy.)

The authors tried to circumvent this limitation in a replication of study 1 by asking each participant to directly predict change rather than inferring predicted change from and ). P. 97 column 2:

Instead of being asked to report or predict their specific personality traits, these participants were simply asked to report how much they felt they had “changed as a person over the last 10 years” and how much they thought they would “change as a person over the next 10 years.”

I think there is an interpretational issue here—we cannot be sure if the participants actually estimated something similar to the expected absolute deviation ). If the participants relied on imagining a future self, then this will again give the absolute expected deviation %7C).

I'm surprised that the authors did not report whether any of the Big Five personality domains mediated this "end of history illusion". That seems like an obvious thing to check. Maybe they're saving that for a later paper.

"The single best way to make predictions about what you're going to want in the future isn't to imagine yourself in the future, … it's to look at other people who are in the very future you're imagining," [Gilbert] says.

In other words, take the outside view.

There is a curious disparity between the ardor with which we tackle the issue of defending against being reprogrammed by an AI, and with which we accept major life changes which, while we sometimes chose them, often result in severe and unpredictable (as per the article) changes of your utility function, your terminal values and whatever else constitutes your identity.

The difference may lie partly in the scope of the transformation, but then again, think of the moron you (yes, you) probably consider your 10 years younger self. Would it be so strange to have reached your present self when hypothetically exchanging your past self with some friend/peer? That's how much/little is preserved. However, I'd expect most of the difference being due to an "agenty" process changing you invoking more self-defense reflexes than the supposedly more "random" process of just living your life.

EDIT: For a more entertaining if hyperbolic example, it's like saying "Never change a thing about my like for Beethoven, or for this particular brand of Irish Whiskey. These are irreducible, terminal values! Wait, there's a button which is gonna randomize me from head to toe, it says "marry, get children". Alright, here we gooooo!"

Funny, the psychologist Robert Sapolsky has written about how people's ability to seek and appreciate novelty seems to fall into a developmental window which closes in our 30's, as we can see from older people's resistance to listening to new genres of music or developing tastes for new kinds of food. That would explain why Baby Boomers still listen to the music they grew up with in the 1960's and 1970's, but they resist eating sushi because that didn't become widely available in the U.S. until the 1980's, after their novelty-seeking phase ended.

I turned 53 back in November, however, and I seem to have less of a problem with that. I recognize the music I grew up with when I hear it on oldies stations or internet channels, but I don't seek it out. In the past 15 years or so I've started to listen to jazz and Celtic music, I eat sushi on occasion and I have even developed a fondness for cats, when previously I didn't care for them. (The Babelfish-like Toxoplasma gondii parasite has probably taken over my brain and turned me into a cat-adoring zombie.)

This phenomenon has some bearing on my current frustrations with the direction of the cryonics movement, because to me many older cryonicists look like they haven't evolved mentally from the time they read certain influential books early in their lives. I don't claim exemption from that tendency, of course, but I chuckled recently when I read a post on New Cryonet by someone who claimed that he learned everything he needed to know about economics from Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. Suppose we could bring back to life an educated, English-speaking individual from the 18th Century who resisted the effort to update his thinking for the 21st Century because he thought he learned everything he needed to know from the books he read 250 years ago? "I mastered everything I need to know about political economy from the pamphlets of the French Physiocrats, thank you, sir."

I've also noticed this tendency in Alcor's CEO, who still refers to Julian L. Simon's famous wager with Paul Ehrlich as an alleged vindication of Simon's cornucopianism over Ehrlich's Malthusianism, even though Peter Thiel has pointed out recently that trends in commodities prices have supported Ehrlich's side of the wager since the 1990's.

And, of course, I have a huge problem now with basing cryonics' propaganda & apologetics on Eric Drexler's fantasies from the 1980's about capital-N Nanotechnology, when that looks increasingly unarrivable. How many more decades have to pass before cryonicists give up on this mirage and look for real technological paths to revival? And why do I have the cognitive plasticity to see this, but apparently no other cryonicist has reached a similar conclusion?

Reference:

http://books.google.com/books?id=oy52m6kgQQMC&lpg=PA199&ots=2SAvuckkAX&dq=sapolsky%20open%20season&pg=PA199#v=onepage&q&f=false

people of any age X predicted less difference with their X+10 selves than people of age X+10 recollected of themselves at age X.

I didn't read the article, or the study, but I'm curious why they conclude "we predict less change than we will actually experience" from this rather than "we recollect more change than we actually experienced."

Regardless, I agree with the conclusion about taking the Outside View.

answering about the present, about themselves 10 years earlier, and about what they expected 10 years hence. They generally reported greater differences between their earlier selves and their present than between their present and future selves.

Nitpick: The comparison was done between predictors and reporters across the same range in age:

Participants were randomly assigned either to the reporter condition (and were asked to complete the measure as they would have completed it 10 years earlier) or the predictor condition (and were asked to complete the measure as they thought they would complete it 10 years hence).

In other words, they compared the 10-year predictions of 18-year-olds to the 10-year reports of 28-year-olds. This is different from (and better than) comparing the 10-year reports and predictions of the same age group.

I wonder how this bias manifests in us lesswrongians. How has your rationality changed over the last 5 years? How do you expect it to change in the coming 5?

The quotations and summary imply they went directly to "therefor people are bad predictors" without passing through "they made bad predictions"

For example, it's not impossible for the past to always be more different from the present than the future is; they could be exponentially approaching a stable self. This is in fact the impression I've gotten from all the talk of old people not changing their minds, people implementing simulated annealing, young people being radical and fickle, etc.

I think the conclusion is probably correct and interesting, but the evidence as quoted only weakly supports it.