Involition

Last year, I wrote Higher power, about the idea that, since your own decisionmaking is fallible, there are times you might need to rely on something else. And when that moment comes, you'll need to ignore your own decisions. Later on I wrote Unfreedom, about the idea that being able to enter into a contract or any other other voluntary restriction means giving up complete freedom, even in some kind of otherwise libertarian utopia.

There's an interesting generalisation of these ideas, that I think of as involition: using your ability to make decisions to give up your ability to make decisions. You ultimately have some set of preferences, values, or goals that govern the choices you make. But what about when it would be beneficial to not have those preferences? Why would that be useful? And can you even actually do it?

For the first part, there definitely seem to be situations you would gain a lot from being in, but would never choose. Lots of kids want to be Batman, but not a lot would choose to have their parents killed in an alley. You can learn a lot from hardship and challenge, but there is some question as to why you would pick hardship and challenge if the alternative is an option. Even if you rationally decide to take on hardship, going back to no hardship seems like an easy choice in the moment.

There are also reasons to occasionally defy your decisionmaking in the interests of creativity and exploration. I wrote a bit about this in Control, The stability tradeoff and Tourism. Your values might say travelling is boring, but maybe deep inside you is a profound love for Japanese culture that you will never find out about unless you accidentally end up there. How do you discover these values without a meta-value that aims to probe at the unknowns in your existing values? Occasionally that might mean committing to things that defy those values.

But in all of this there is a problem: how do you give up control when you still have control? I mean, you can pretend that you're going to act against your preferences, but deep down you know you can stop at any time, so why wouldn't you? You can say "I'm going to throw a dart at an atlas and go wherever it says", but if it lands on Syria you'll probably throw again. Maybe that's the smart thing, but on the other hand if you're going to decide what outcomes are acceptable, what was the point of giving up your decisions in the first place?

I'm reminded of Paul Romer's charter cities, which suffer quite severely from this problem. The idea was that a country would give up a small area to be an independent region with its own laws, in the hope that it would yield interesting developments or results unattainable in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, as the hodgepodge of tribal sovreignty has shown us, sovreignty-within-sovreignty doesn't really work. A government considers itself responsible for everything within its borders, so the best a charter city can do without complete independence is some subset of the host country's values.

Ultimately, the challenge here is to find controlled ways to exercise involition. One option would be to build incentives that are big enough to make you act against your regular preferences (big fines if you break the deal are a common approach). Another option is to make irreversible (or difficult to reverse) decisions, like selling all your stuff or moving to a different country and figuring it out when you get there. There may also be an approach where you build a value of trust or faith (that's the Higher Power idea) strong enough to overcome your other values, which is perhaps the easiest but also the most dangerous.