Taking into account preferences of past selves
8Dagon
2Jacob G-W
7Ustice
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
1Ustice
3Gordon Seidoh Worley
6Brendan Long
1Jacob G-W
5Celarix
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if I were perfectly rational agent ...
Yeah, "perfectly rational" implies consistency over time, which is the whole question you're struggling with.
if you keep adding strict prohibitions onto your future self, you are limiting all your future options
Right, that's kind of the point, isn't it? You don't trust your future self to be consistent with your present beliefs, so you constrain it. Note that there are current-self tactics based on the same principle: you might not trust parts of your decision apparatus to make food choices, for instance, that other parts of you prefer, and therefore don't keep junk food at hand.
Most older people I know (including myself), recognize that their younger selves were jerks, or at least confused about a lot of things. They often regret commitments made previously (and often agree with them, but in those cases the commitment isn't binding, as they like it anyway).
I'd recommend not framing this as a negotiation or trade (acausal trade is close, but is pretty suspect in itself). Your past self(ves) DO NOT EXIST anymore, and can't judge you. Your current self will be dead when your future self is making choices. Instead, frame it as love, respect, and understanding. You want your future self to be happy and satisfied, and your current choices impact that. You want your current choices to honor those parts of your past self(ves) you remember fondly. This can be extended to the expectation that your future self will want to act in accordance with a mosty-consistent self-image that aligns in big ways with it's past (your current) self.
This framing is consistent with most of your concrete suggestions - those are reinforcing the importance (to you currently) of these values, and the memory of this exploration, documentation, and thinking about why you currently care about future actions will inform your future self's values. It's not a contract, it's persuasion.
I'd recommend not framing this as a negotiation or trade (acausal trade is close, but is pretty suspect in itself). Your past self(ves) DO NOT EXIST anymore, and can't judge you. Your current self will be dead when your future self is making choices. Instead, frame it as love, respect, and understanding. You want your future self to be happy and satisfied, and your current choices impact that. You want your current choices to honor those parts of your past self(ves) you remember fondly. This can be extended to the expectation that your future self will want to act in accordance with a mosty-consistent self-image that aligns in big ways with it's past (your current) self.
Yep, this is what I had in mind when I wrote this:
Even if we bite all these bullets, there is still something weird to me about the contractual nature of it all. This is not some stranger I’m trying to make a deal with, it’s myself. There should be a gentler, nicer, way to achieve this same goal.
and
Going along with the “gentler” reasoning, it should want to do it because it has camaraderie with its past self. It should want its past self to be happy and it knows that to make it happy, it should take its preferences into account.
Thanks for expanding on this :)
Unless you are going to one of the big prestige universities, I don’t think it matters which you choose all that much. Save money.
As for working with a startup, why not both? I worked through college. Yeah, you’ll be working part time, but frankly, you’re mostly just being introduced to the environment more than anything. Internships are a great start into many industries. Just make sure that you are doing a paid internship. In my experience the unpaid ones are more focused on how much value they can extract from you.
Unless you are going to one of the big prestige universities, I don’t think it matters which you choose all that much. Save money.
My experience is that this is right. The list of top-tier global institutions, in terms of prestige, is short: Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, CalTech, maybe Berkeley, maybe Stanford and Waterloo if you want to work in tech, maybe another Ivy if you want to do something non-tech. The prestige bump falls off fast as you move further down the list. Lots of universities have local prestige but it gets lost as you talk to people with less context.
Prestige mostly matters if you want to do something that requires it as the cost of entry. If you can get in, it doesn't hurt to have the prestige of a top-tier institution, but there's lots of things you might do where the prestige will be wasted.
Sadly, this is a tough thing to know whether you will need the prestige or not. You'll have to make an expected value calculation against the cost and make the best choice you can to minimize the risk of regret.
Also matters what the experience is like. High prestige university allows you to get a job at a high prestige company. Low prestige university makes it a lot harder to get considered for jobs at high prestige firms. You'll have to outperform high-prestige peers by, say, 50% to get noticed if you want access to the same sort of opportunities they get access to via prestige.
(To be clear, I'm not in favor of this sort of thing, I just want to be realistic about it and I wish someone had been real with me about it when I was 17 trying to decide where to go to college. Don't rely on your ability to outperform others. Take every advantage you can get and then leverage them to do even more!)
1
1You should probably take reverse-causation into account here. I doubt the effect of the school is nearly as strong as you think, since people who want finance jobs are drawn to the schools known for getting people finance jobs. Add to that that the schools known for certain things are the outliers. If you go to a random state school, the students are going to have much more varying interests.
1I don’t want to spend ten years figuring this out.
A driving factor in my own philosophy around figuring out what to do with my life. Some people spend decades doing something or living with something they don't like, or even something more trivially correctable, like spending one weekend to clean up the basement vs. living with a cluttered mess for years on end.