Dear Cambridge philosophers of science, Tomorrow, 14 February, is the fourth meeting of CamPoS for Lent, as usual at 1 p.m. in the HPS department in seminar room 2 in the basement. Craig Callender of UC San Diego will be speaking on 'Yikes! Why Did Past-Me Say He'd Give a Talk on Future Discounting?' An abstract is below.
Sincerely, J. Brian Pitts Abstract: That we discount future utility is a behavior studied in work on savings, addiction, health, public policy, and more. Is it rational? Economists: yes, but only if the rate is exponential. Philosophers: no. Psychologists: we judge not, but note that high discount rates are associated with poor life outcomes. Pulling these strands together, a conventional wisdom has arisen that identifies discounting as a cognitive bias. Economics or philosophy supplies a normative standard and psychology tells us that we systematically depart from this standard. Discounting or non-exponential discounting happens when hot fast emotional systems demand immediate gratification, swamping our otherwise cool rational temporally neutral systems. My talk aims to challenge this conventional wisdom and defend alleged time biases. -- J. Brian Pitts Senior Research Associate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge jb...@cam.ac.uk Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
