😀

The goal is to wind people up – so I’m glad to hear that.

I believe our arguments regarded externalities through the tax system – not “internalities”. I’m not much of a fan of taxes that are justified by hyperbolic discounting myself – I have a cognitive bias against them I guess 😛

I’ve never put much stock in the idea that government ought regulate or tax to rectify internalities: folks have way too many ways of self-regulating for such things; evidence that they choose not to I take as evidence of a meta-preference not to change their behaviour rather than as evidence that they have conflicting homunculi.

Of course, I’ve scrapped a bit with Matt about this before :>

It is exactly what you guess: it refers to the shape of the curve that the discount factor makes over time. However, most of the time, when people refer to hyperbolic discounting, they don’t actually use hyperbolic curves because it is too mathematically complex.

One popular way to model it is to say that people discount hyperbolically. Essentially that means that their decision will change over time: they’ll want to quit in future, but when it comes time to quit they’ll put off quitting again. That’s used as a way to reconcile the fact that smokers constantly try to quit with the observation that they rarely do. Hyperbolic discounting also helps to explain a lot of phemonena that we observe and is supported by experimental evidence.

Of course, not everyone smokes. So usually we’d say that some people just like smoking more than others, but this study gives us more information. It tells us that people who smoke actually value the future costs of smoking less, too. Knowing more about how smokers make decisions helps inform any smoking policy that we may wish to advocate by giving our models of smoking richer detail.

I hope that kinda helps explain why this result is interesting 🙂

Is this hyperbolic discounting? “it’ll never happen to me” and “I’m in control and can give up any time I want”.

Not everyone subscribes to the Vulcan dogma of living long and prospering.