Customer Reviews

Breakdown of Will

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Breakdown of Will is an interesting and thought provoking book on the effect that hyperbolic discounting of valuation has on psychology and self control. Ainslie shows how his theory of picoeconomics and intrapersonal bargaining can shed light on phenomena such as willfulness,personal inconsistency,addiction and many other things that are difficult to explain via other theories. Highly recommended for anyone interested in psychology and philosophy of mind.

This book analyzes will, mainly problems connected with willpower, as a form of intertemporal bargaining between a current self that highly values immediate temptation and future selves who prefer that current choices be more far-sighted. He contrasts simple models of rational agents who exponentially discount future utility with his more sophisticated and complex model of people whose natural discount curve is hyperbolic. Hyperbolic discounting causes time-inconsistent preferences, resulting in problems such as addiction. Intertemporal bargains can generate rules which bundle rewards to produce behavior more closely approximating the more consistent exponential discount model.

He also discusses problems associated with habituation to rewards, and strategies that can be used to preserve an appetite for common rewards. For example, gambling might sometimes be rational if losing money that way restores an appetite for acquiring wealth.

Some interesting ideas mentioned are that timidity can be an addiction, and that pain involves some immediate short-lived reward (to draw attention) in addition to the more obvious negative effects.

For someone who already knows a fair amount about psychology, only small parts of the book will be surprising, but most parts will help you think a bit clearer about a broad range of problems.

Not going to go into all the details, but this is a very good book. Quickly - I was reading Daniel Dennett's "Freedom Evolves" (another good book if not the best writing)and saw Ainslie's book mentioned multiple times in interesting ways and it piqued my interest. So I got this book and was glad I did. His theories about "hyperbolic discounting" and intertemporal bargaining are very interesting and plausible in terms of explaining some strange behaviors such as addictions - how is it that we can do what we know to be wrong? (e.g. breaking a promise to self, gamblers who keep taking risk until they lose despite knowing if they keep betting forever they will lose everything, etc.). Is addiction a mistake or a preference? I recommend this book for anyone interested in these kind of questions and prepared to read a fairly challening book.

I experienced breakdown of will several times, once in front of my friends, an incident that I can recall very well! I think that the breakdown of will is not a very good thing.