Temptation
Our relationship with temptation stretches back to stories from the bible and antiquity. Whether it is eating the forbidden fruit or opening Pandora’s box, temptation seems intimately linked to human nature. But is it our responsibility to remove temptation from others or is this an area where the so-called nanny state seeks to interfere with our personal choices?
In this week’s podcast, we discuss temptation. We focus our attention on the example of bringing cake into the office. In doing so, we discuss deontology and consequentialism, ego depletion, the marshmallow test, and the economic theory of time inconsistency. Nick presents his temptability index and we reveal our favourite cakes and gastronomic temptations.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Bringing cake to the office is as harmful as passive smoking
- The psychology of temptation
- House of Lords: Regina v Looseley
- Ten prohibited advertising categories
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing cake temptation.
Speaker B:Nick, been tempted lately? Professor Susan Jebb. That well-known temptress? No, no, she's not. She's an extremely professional person, and she's the chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, which is an agency that, I guess, sets standards for food. Is that in the US? No, UK. She made the completely reasonable observation that, she said, I'm quoting her, if nobody brought cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day. But because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I've made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub. This is presented in a much more sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? Erudite? No, more academic. Sensational. It's presented in a much more sensational way as the headline where she's saying, bringing cake into the office is as harmful as passive smoking. I don't think she's saying that. But what she's saying... Where was that presented? What do you mean, in the sun or something? Yes, Sky News. Oh, OK. I think what she's saying is, in the comparison, is that we recognise that if we want to stop people smoking, we have to create an environment where it's harder to do that. So when we got rid of smoking in pubs, fewer people smoked. I mean, you know, we know that. I think she's just saying we've got to think about other contexts in which that might be true, including, for example, bringing cakes into the office. Now...
Speaker A:Just say it's not why they abolished smoking in pubs, though, but keep going.
Speaker B:Well, right. So the headline is saying she's comparing it to passive smoking. I don't think that's quite what she's getting at. So if you're eating a cake, it doesn't make me fat, right? That's the issue with passive smoking, that people aren't choosing in some sense.
Speaker A:But it's not about this thing about removing... So one of the secondary effects of banning smoking in pubs was actually people smoked less. Now, I don't think that was the aim. The aim was to make that a healthy environment for everyone.
Speaker B:Right. OK. So what I'm saying is that you've got the analogy is doing a slightly different job. She isn't saying bringing cake into the office is like passive smoking, right?
Speaker C:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, to some extent, it might be. We'll get onto that. But I think what she's saying is that, you know, bringing a cake to the office has an effect that people are going to eat cake when they wouldn't have done. And that therefore you have, in some sense, a responsibility to think about that. I think there's a lot of outrage about it because it's, you know, oh, now they're trying to ban cakes in the office. Yeah, now they say it. I don't think that's what this is about. But we already... Peter responded with outrage when he suggested this topic. And I'm not sure...
Speaker A:Although logically, it would reduce obesity if you banned cakes in the office.
Speaker B:The question we want to look into is, is it your responsibility to remove temptation from others? Because, you know, the fact is people like cake. I think where the analogy is slightly abridged. You're giving people nice cakes, which they wouldn't otherwise have had.
Speaker A:Famously, there's precedent here. We've got, it's not in the statutes, but there was those people, what were they called? Oh, yeah, Adam and Eve. And, you know, I think it was Eve that got tempted. And who was it who tempted? It was the devil, wasn't it? So we know where he sits on this.
Speaker B:A famously bad guy.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. And he's into the whole... I mean, so yeah, was it Eve's fault, right?
Speaker B:Right. So I think, well, we might go to Peter to get his instant reaction. But there's a lot to unpick, actually, in this one simple question.
Speaker A:Yeah. Peter, cakes, good or bad?
Speaker D:Well, I think where the analogy slightly breaks down is that with cake, you still have that choice, don't you? You still have the choice not to eat it. Whereas with passive smoking, you don't have that choice.
Speaker B:You have the choice not to go into a pub.
Speaker D:We have that choice. But assuming that you have to go into the pub. Why? Well, because it's the only place to go, for example, in lots of places in the UK. It's the only thing. It's the main focus of social activity.
Speaker A:No, but I think she's making a different point, which is that, yes, of course, people all got personal responsibility. However, the external imposition of a new rule will have an effect. Okay. And in both of these cases, albeit for different reasons, it has a positive outcome for the person that, albeit they've got agency, it's still helping that person somehow. I know that's really vague, but I think that's kind of logically sort of as far as you can take it in a way. She's saying, hey, this external imposition actually is quite a good thing.
Speaker B:Yeah. So was it the case that pub owners actually before the law came in, did they have a moral responsibility to remove the ability of people to smoke, to remove the temptation? Should we not let them sell cigarettes, that sort of thing? But the point is, are you morally culpable of someone else eating a cake and becoming obese by bringing cakes into the office? Discuss.
Speaker A:Yeah. And in fact, we need to sort of slightly move away from her and even just that question itself. Let's focus on that. Stick with the cakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, stick with the cakes is fine, but let's not get hung up on what she said.
Speaker D:What's the deontologist position on this? Is bringing cake into the office a good idea? What's a deontologist? Someone who says that deontology is a form of metaethics. What's metaethics? It's a school of ethics that says that actions are inherently, have an inherent properties which make them good or bad. Yeah, kind of duties and virtues and that kind of thing. Yeah. And it's often contrasted to consequentialism, which says that you're- How do you know about this stuff? Anyway, sorry, keep going. It's a well-educated, well-rounded individual. An action has no inherent goodness or badness about it. It's what happens as a result of that.
Speaker A:I thought you were an engineer.
Speaker D:Yeah, well, I'm a conceptual engineer. What's a conceptual engineer? He's a cognitive engineer. So yeah, so consequentialism is very different to deontology. Consequentialism will say, well, bringing the cake into the office itself is nothing inherently good or bad about that action. Look- It's the consequence as a result. And that gets messy and complicated very quickly because it doesn't give you an answer.
Speaker A:So we're talking messy and complicated. I want to answer this in my way, which is I don't understand all this stuff that you're talking about. But do I think there should be a law or even a regulation given a company or a building that people are not allowed to bring in cakes? No, I don't think that. Right. However, do I think it might not be a bad idea and so therefore might be a good idea if we have an informal arrangement where, do you know what, guys, we've been eating a lot of cakes recently. I've been putting on a few kilos. Shall we just agree informally amongst ourselves to not bring in cakes? And I think that's a good, I would sign up to that.
Speaker B:But also just to touch on what you just said there, which I think is something that people, why you get a lot of shouting in this kind of debate is that people think saying this is wrong is the same as saying this should be banned. Now, it's not the case. Like, should you read to your kids? Yes, yes. Should it be the law? Yes. There's loads of things we think are kind of good or bad or which you ought to do or not to do, which aren't in the law. We're not talking about that. We're not saying should it be illegal to bring a cake into the office? Very difficult to enforce.
Speaker D:Yeah. I like your solution, though, of having just your local culture decide what they want to do about this. And, you know, if it means that you want to slap health warnings on boxes full of cakes or put them in a, keep them in the kitchen area away from the working area or some sort of local control.
Speaker A:Yeah, out of sight, out of mind. And actually, I was once in a workplace where we did something similar, which was birthday cards, because we were a department of about 20, 25 people. And it was getting absurd. I mean, it was just everyone out there, there's a card goes round and you go, I have a good one. And that was kind of it. And we all agreed together, look, this is idiotic. No one gives a toss about receiving these cards. And it's just a pain writing them out. But Nick, help me out. Where are we?
Speaker B:Well, this is about temptation.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker B: here's, I found an essay from: Speaker A:We're tempted to do only. Yeah.
Speaker B:OK, nice. That gnawing, I really want a cake, right? Which it only exists if there's a cake there. I might think, oh, I really, you know, I really want to, I don't know, to have a billion pounds or something. But it doesn't, I don't feel tempted to do it. Oh, I fancy a bit of a billion. Yeah. You don't get that feeling of like, of like intrusion about, you know, go on, have the cake, right? So there's that observation, which is more profound than it looks, as I said, I think, which is that, which is that by giving someone an option to do something, you are imposing, in a sense, the possibility of temptation at all.
Speaker A:Also, different people have different vulnerabilities here. And actually, something you mentioned there, just this happened to me recently, to my distress, I've been super healthy over the last year, doing lots of exercise, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know how or why it quite happened. But in the weeks up before, before Christmas, I started smoking again. Okay.
Speaker D:Yeah, I noticed that.
Speaker A:Yeah. When? How? When did we see each other and I was smoking?
Speaker D:Well, last time we were recording podcast, November, I think. I wasn't smoking then. You're always, you're always smoking.
Speaker A:And you must have been rubbing me too hard, Peter. But, but yeah, and so I don't like it. And I had to come clean almost immediately with my wife because she hates it. And I just wanted to get it out there, right? And say, hey, look, this is what I'm doing. But I need to stop. I'm going to stop. I'm on board with this. And I went away to one country. And I thought for that country, I'm just going to carry on. It's fine. But that will be the line when I come back from that country. But sort of to my surprise, I went to another country last week. I was in Paris for the weekend. And even though I'd sort of stopped for two weeks, it's fine. The moment I landed in Paris, I started going, oh, do you know what?
Speaker B:So it's already, it becomes a thing. It's there, it's present. So but I want to say that this issue, this problem of temptation is almost the universal problem of human nature. It really underpins almost every bad thing that people do. Just that an opportunity is present. No, not just the problem of temptation. Oh, OK. So which you can tell kind of because of what a big deal it is for religions. Religions are obsessed with temptation. And they all preach restraint, don't they? You've got from the Stoics to the, you know, the Buddhists and the Judeo-Christian tradition is all about, you know, avoiding temptation. I mean, to personify temptation as the devil tells you what you need to know about the fact that this idea that temptation is bad has always been with us.
Speaker A:So there's that moral angle, but maybe they're right. Right, right. Because eating loads of cake is probably a poor outcome for you.
Speaker B:So what are the problems that you could pin on, you know, temptation and willpower failure? So we've covered obesity, but any kind of addiction. Yeah. Lung cancer. Addictions have harms. Yeah, yeah. A lot of, you know, like debt and gambling.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah. Even procrastination and not getting stuff done.
Speaker B:Yeah. Relationship problems, marital discord, affairs.
Speaker A:Bloody temptation, doesn't it? Yeah.
Speaker B:But yeah, I mean, procrastination certainly in everyday life is probably how it's felt most keenly. You know, it's that sort of productivity problem of, you know, there's a thing you've got to do. And so you do loads of pointless things instead. So it's a really significant issue. And I think the one that we all struggle with, I mean, in terms of what it is, my best explanation for how to think about what it is, is a conflict between your present self and your future self. They actually want different things.
Speaker A:This ties right in with another podcast we did, Pleasure and Happiness. Right. Two different things, two different people within oneself.
Speaker B:Yeah. Yeah. So I think and the problem is that there's a lot more future selves that you're going to be, but there's only one present self. And the trouble is that he's that bastard who's making the decision. Yeah. And it's like your monkey brain, which tells you that this cake is going to be better than any amount of future skinniness. And it doesn't really matter. All that one cigarette and that feeling of freedom you get is going to be way better than any health.
Speaker A:That crisp, smooth sort of. Yeah.
Speaker B:The lovely crackle of the first puff of a new cigarette. You know, that's the guy who's making the decisions. And I think that's the heart of all of the problems that we've looked at here.
Speaker A:Yeah. I think you've got it. You've nailed it. What do we do about it? What was the initial question we were asking? Oh, yeah. Should we ban cakes?
Speaker B:Yeah. Is it wrong to tempt people?
Speaker A:OK, so nice. As you say, this is a universal thing and we need to be helped from ourselves, Peter, don't we? It's good that people can help us in this.
Speaker D:Yeah. Well, Chris, Nick already mentioned stoicism and in the teachings of... Was it Aristotle?
Speaker B:I think of Diogenes as the stoic guy.
Speaker A:As the King Stoic bloke.
Speaker D:Anyway, their teachings are the basis for a lot of cognitive therapies. CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mindfulness. And take it to the extreme, it's obviously an extreme kind of philosophy. But in there are cognitive behaviors which, if practiced, can help with a lot of these things. For example, mindfulness is about being kind of in tune and aware of the moment and not having a kind of future worrying, future thinking, abstract view of the moment. Yeah, and not being on autopilot. And not being on autopilot. So it's like being in tune with stuff. So like planting your feet and touching the table and things are all kind of mindfulness things to do to get you back in the moment. And what that lets you do is abstract yourself, your id or whatever it is that's being you from the situation. You can take a step back and say, my feelings about the situation are not the same thing as the situation. So that clawing desire to tuck into that chocolate cake is not the same thing as me sitting here looking at that chocolate cake. I can then start treating that as a separate thing. I can park it or delay it or ignore it.
Speaker B:But it sounds like what you're describing as being in the moment is almost like actually stepping back out of the moment and taking a longer term view.
Speaker D:Well, it's being in the moment physically instead of having a more awareness of the physicality of the moment and not the emotional part of the moment. The emotional part of the moment is only part of the moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Well, I just mentioned a bit of evidence about willpower and temptability.
Speaker A:Because also I think it does tie in with some people are like Peter and can look at a cake and be fine. Iron Coghill. Yeah. Some people are more like me. Yeah.
Speaker B:And like, oh, the cake's gone. Yeah. So I think there's a fairness element to it. But just in terms of the evidence on willpower is, as far as I can tell, well, it's a lot of the kind of famous willpower studies haven't replicated. But there's a few that are really strong. And in fact, they tie very much in my mind into my sort of everyday experience. But that your executive processes do get tired, right? So this is sometimes called ego depletion. It's sort of people frame it as being you've got a kind of battery of willpower that can recharge. But if you've used too much willpower recently, then you just don't have any left. Yeah. As I said, some of those experiments haven't replicated very well. But it feels so right to me that I'm not willing to question that.
Speaker D:But I think there's particular questions about whether you can train it so you can build up that battery bigger.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think there's some evidence that you can.
Speaker A:But also, I can imagine depletion of willpower as a thing, but also, you know, your physical and emotional mental state at any given moment. Yeah, I mean, stress.
Speaker B:If I'm stressed with work, I can't, I'm just reaching for the cake. Whereas, yeah, in my case, it's sort of savoury things like sandwiches, toast sandwiches. Yeah, yeah. Toast sandwiches. But, you know, and sort of, you know, yeah, fat and protein are what I go for rather than sugar. But it's the same thing, like, and I can be, you know, a week into a holiday, I can sit there and go, brilliant. I'm, you know, it's the new me. I'm absolutely going to stick to this diet. I really like salads. I mean, I do genuinely, perfectly happy on a diet. But as soon as, but there's just a little bit of a hump to get over where you think I'm not going to eat that packet of crisps. And that goes. As soon as I've had, like, lots of work stress and no sleep, forget about it. It's just, you know, and I know while I'm doing it, I'm sort of going, I don't really want to do this. I've got nothing. There's nothing else I can do. I'm being forced into a corner of eating these hula hoops by work. Yeah, it's a really, really kind of, you know, existentially unusual situation. But I'm guessing that's just a more self-aware version of what I would be doing if I wasn't thinking like that. I'd just be eating the crisps. But as it is, I'm watching myself doing it and going, why the hell am I doing that?
Speaker D:So in short, the insight, the stoicism is not the answer. It could provide you insight, but you're still going to, your reptilian brain is still going to demand that you eat.
Speaker A: e sitting in MOD office circa: Speaker B:Yeah. Although there is cake.
Speaker A:Well, anyway.
Speaker B:But the other key thing to mention is about sort of the extent to which willpower is. So that's on a tactical level. It behaves as though there's a kind of bank of willpower that you can use up. But the extent to which it's driven by your genetics and personal personality makeup. So the marshmallow tests are the most famous ones where they took kids, little kids and here's a marshmallow. You can eat it now, but if you don't, when I come back, you can have and you can have two marshmallows. And that turned out to be a really strong predictor of various life success. You know, if they could hold off. Sadly for me. Yeah. I remember telling my son about this when he was about seven. He said, well, I wouldn't eat the marshmallow. And I said, good boy. And he said, because I don't like marshmallows.
Speaker D:I'd ask how long until they're coming back?
Speaker B:Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing that sometimes they didn't tell them. I was going to say that could be another iteration. If they didn't tell them, they were much more likely. So if they said it would be five minutes, right, then they could wait five minutes. But if they didn't say, a lot of them would break after three or four minutes. But if they knew when it was going to end, that did make a difference. So anyway, I suppose so there is evidence that this is something that the amount of willpower you have is what you're born with. That does have fairness implications about rules. Yeah. But we'll talk about that as well.
Speaker A:So look, where are we going with this? I don't think we've said anything particularly.
Speaker B:I mean, I think we want to work out what a good rule would be, right? Right. Your thing that you set out at the beginning still doesn't solve the collective. Does it not? Yeah. What do you do if someone does bring a cake in?
Speaker A:We throw the cake in the bin. No, I mean, it's.
Speaker B:But also, what if someone wants to. What is, yeah, go on. You know, but the thing is, you can't. What if two people want to have a cake and they come in packets of three? You know, and somebody I mean, that's that's the problem we've got.
Speaker A:But this is like the British Constitution. You know, it's we've got this rule rule. Yeah, it's yeah. Like we kind of all know what it is. We all trust it. And OK, maybe sometimes we bend it a bit, but we know what the general rule is. And we'll go along with it. What we don't want is an American constitution where we write it all down. And then 250 years from now, we've got cake tyranny or anti-cake type of food, which is it.
Speaker B:We don't even know if it's a cake. Is it a cake or is it a biscuit?
Speaker D:Yeah. The new type of food lobbyists are going to be.
Speaker B:Yeah. Yeah. Getting reclassified as a non-cake.
Speaker A:Yeah. Someone brings in Jaffa cakes and there's uproar or confusion. No. So no, that's my feeling is that we all kind of have this. And and and and the other the general atmosphere of my office is that, you know, it's because in other things and non-cake related, we've we've got trust and sort of maturity there. And so therefore, this approach to the cake rules can thrive and we will get it. And I mean, that's my view.
Speaker D:I would like to suggest that the libertarian approach would be bring cakes in, bring handguns. And if you want, I don't care. But the point is that you when you put. Cakes and handguns. But when you when you put the cake on the on the on the table, you have to have a health warning on it. No, no, no.
Speaker B:This will make you fat. That's not the libertarian approach would be to allow people to do that. But also to say that, you know, you can also create your own office, your own company where cakes are banned. Yeah. And the point is that if people wanted to be in a cake banned place, they'd work for less to be there. But if people wanted to be in a free cake environment, then they could go and work there.
Speaker D:I'm thinking about empowering people at the point when they're making the decision to make the correct decision by giving them information.
Speaker A:I'm a bit worried, actually, in our respective companies or whatever we do, that the people who come and work for us, they're basing their decisions too much on the cake policy rather than other skills and ambitions they might have. But I mean, I don't know. But yours, you know, I mean, because so what? You've got a warning on there that clearly doesn't really work. I'm willing to bet that smoking in the UK has been reduced far more by a ban on it in pubs than on putting horrible guns and stuff on cigarette packets.
Speaker D:Yeah, I would agree. That's probably true. So your system's rubbish. I'm not saying it's the best system. Well, mine's a better system. It aligns with my values the most.
Speaker B:Where do you sit on this then? Well, I think you've got to face up to the fact that there is a moral impact on you bringing a cake in and putting it in front of someone who's on a diet. That is harmful to them. That's practically murder. Well, it could be with enough cakes. But the point is, there's no getting around the fact that it's potentially harmful, right? So you're harming them as much as you're harming someone by driving carelessly. Like you're having a negative, potential negative impact on someone by an action that you take. I don't see, like there's no other way around that.
Speaker A:Because I sort of see it differently. And I thought, no, I'm more interested in the outcome. But actually, if I needed to justify my outcome, well, there's a good justification right there. So actually, it's kind of another part of the equation, as it were. So yeah, I'm with you on that.
Speaker B:Yeah, but I've got some suggestions just based on kind of the economic theory of time inconsistency. But we'll get to that in a minute.
Speaker A:Oh, that's my second favorite.
Speaker D:I want to invoke the slippery slope argument. Go on. So say we ban cakes, and then we start banning biscuits. We ban tea, because caffeine's bad for you. We basically ban everything.
Speaker A:I didn't speak up because I was a cake eater. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay, I see where this is going.
Speaker D:So at some point, we will end up living in a world bereft of any kind of enjoyment or fun. Is that a manifesto, or is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:Coghill's YouTube, that's the strategy.
Speaker B:A single constant experience of meh.
Speaker A:Yeah, which in itself, because you've managed expectations, makes everyone super happy. It's a bit like Britain, really.
Speaker D:But you could make the case that anything you do in the office would be bad for somebody at some point. Like people laughing in the office. Well, people feel left out if they're not part of the joke. So no laughing in the office.
Speaker B:Oh, I'm not saying it's straightforward. I'm not throwing my weight behind a ban, either.
Speaker D:So how do we calculate, there's some sort of complex function here going on of like goodness in terms of people having fun in the office and eating cake and laughing and having jokes. And then maximising people's health, which also has an effect on happiness, and some sort of metric of which one to maximise. So how do we calculate the maximum?
Speaker A:Well, can't we just do this on a case-by-case basis?
Speaker B:Hang on, I think there's some other things we need to unpick, really. And it's to do with what kind of policy and who should be making it, right? But I just wanted to throw in a couple of other things that are pertinent, which shine a bit of a sidelight on temptation and what we think about it, right? So first is entrapment, which is where you tempt someone to commit a crime as the police. And apparently, that's not actually a defence in the UK. But apparently, it's an abuse of court processes. So there was a case where an undercover policeman apparently found a vulnerable drug addict and basically pestered them to supply him with drugs until he did. And that was considered one of the key cases from the last 20, 30 years. So we recognise that it's wrong of the police to tempt people to commit crimes, right? Then advertising. If you look at the things that are banned, that you're not allowed to advertise, actually quite a lot of them are related to things that people get tempted to do that are bad. So you're not allowed to advertise, yeah. And betting systems, prostitution, obscene material, pyramid schemes.
Speaker A:So this is out there already. What we're discussing, hey, is this good or bad? Well, actually, it's already out there.
Speaker B:Well, in a way, like we found, I suppose you could say that the things that people find, let's say the biggest mismatch between temptability and harmful consequence, which we might call the sort of temptability index, if it's high temptability and high harm, you know, you multiply them together. And if that number is high, it's got a high temptability index. So there could be things that are really harmful, like throwing yourself off, you know, into the traffic or something, which are harmful, but nobody is tempted to do. And then there's things that we're kind of tempted to do that probably aren't that harmful. I'm not sure what they are. I wish I was tempted to do. But anyway, yeah.
Speaker A:So we can apply this temptability index to the rules, formal or informal otherwise, of our office, right? So when someone like Peter pipes up, what about tea? Are we going to ban that as well then? And we go, well, maybe yes, maybe no. Let's run it up the flag of the temptability index.
Speaker B:I'd say tea harm, let's say low. Low, right? It's true. Caffeine probably has some good and bad effects. Etc. But I'd say temptability also low. Like I never get craving. I don't get a craving for a cup of tea. But anyway, yeah. Yeah, I think I do.
Speaker A:But anyway, I think it works on that scale. Like, you know, and then as an office, we all have an understanding that actually, do you know what? It falls below the, you know, the demands of our temptability index is number three, not six. So we're fine. So, yeah.
Speaker D:The way you measure it doesn't get around the problem of the slippery slope argument where you're just, once you just go for the next lowest thing.
Speaker B:No, but it gives you a means. It gives you a means to enforce a kind of a cut off to say, okay, we know this is a sliding scale, but here's our cut off. And we will only allow you to bring things in if they're below that level. Yeah. So I think I would say that cakes would be, I think the problem is cakes are probably skirting where a reasonable level would be. Like you might say, what if I made a cake that was, you know, had cocaine and, you know, and tobacco. A beer cake with a cocaine icing. I mean, if you worked after work, that's like alcohol, like bringing an alcohol to an office and leaving a can of beer there, which anyone can grab. And you happen to know that you work with a couple of alcoholics, you know, who are recovering probably seems a bit irresponsible. I'd say that would come above, you know, the temptability is high. But anyway, there's also, so the point is this fairness issue, which we haven't discussed, which of course is that some people can just have one cake and that actually those people would probably jog home or go to the gym after work and then make themselves some broccoli and a grilled chicken.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a shame Chris Wragg's not here. He's probably off jogging somewhere. I mean, he's not going to be tempted by a cake.
Speaker B:But I'm thinking of the people who are in the sweet spot of being tempted just as the right amount for how pleasurable it is. So because I think that what we're going back to what is the fundamental problem here about this mismatch between the kind of now decision maker versus the future decision maker who actually has to deal with the consequences is if you could take the view from nowhere, if you could take the view on behalf of all of those decision makers, all of you stretched out over time, then you would price it properly. And you'd go, well, this cake, one cake, that's going to be a half an hour jog. All right. Ten cakes. No, that's too much. That's not worth what I have to do to kind of undo the damage. And you'd be able to price it properly. See, now my problem is that intrinsically, me now, present guy, has just way too much, puts way too much value on the, not in my case, cakes, but let's say cakes. I could happily eat ten cakes or a whole pizza. I could happily eat an entire pizza. Knowing full well that if I was planning how much pizza I wanted tomorrow, I'd choose at most half a pizza. I've got another idea. And if tomorrow me was making a choice about how much pizza I should have eaten, he would say three slices. Yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. So if I, but if I could take, if I could take a view that balanced all of those different people, then I would make, I'd eat the right amount of pizza. And present me, the guy in charge, would be making precisely the decisions that he ought to be making. So I suppose what I'm saying is the things that score highly on this are probably the ones where that mismatch is most significant. The mismatch between present goodness and future consequences. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker D:I think, yeah, that's it. Sounds good. Yeah. Peter? I've got a solution. Go. You're allowed to bring cakes in. Right. But you have to announce that you're bringing cakes in at least a day beforehand. Yeah. And people are allowed to book whether or not they want a piece of cake. Book the cake. Perfect. So cakes, at that point, the person saying, I want a piece of cake. So the cake is an abstract concept. It's not there. They can't smell it. Yeah. They're making a sensible decision about the future itself. And you could empower them and say, I'm going to bring a cake in tomorrow. I'm going to bring a cake tomorrow. Would anyone like a slice? This is a disastrous idea. By the way, each slice is equivalent to about half an hour's run. So they can make a rational choice about this abstract cake concept. And you can actually get the run out of the way in the morning. Hold on. Grab your cake.
Speaker A:I would be OK with this as long as under certain conditions. First of all, the cake is not consumed in sort of public view within the office. One. OK, yeah. So we'll set up cake booths for eating the cake. Yeah. And it's not allowed to be eaten all at once. So it can't be that like half the office suddenly disappears. And even if we can't see where we've gone, we know.
Speaker D:You book a slot and that's all de-conflicted. Yeah, something like that. It's a tech-enabled cake solution. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. Yeah. So you've got an app called Cakely, which does all this for you. Yeah.
Speaker A:So I think I'd be willing to trial that within my office already. I have those rules already set out.
Speaker B:So I think this is a category of well, I mean, it's the same problem, really, but just which is this problem of sort of intertemporal commitments where you're able to make a commitment about something in the future and how that might get enforced is a bit problematic. The classic example from, you know, the sort of mythology is Ulysses and the Sirens in that Ulysses knew he wanted to hear the beautiful music of the Sirens, but he knew that were he to do so, he would be tempted to jump off the ship and swim to his death. Right. So he commanded his crew to tie him to the mast and they all had to put wax in their ears so they couldn't hear the song of the Sirens. And then that way, even though, and he said to them, you know, it doesn't matter. I'm going to tell you to untie me, but you mustn't. Right. So that is a good example of a sort of binding future commitment. You're preventing yourself from being able to do something. Yeah. Now, in this context, and very much along the lines of Peter's solution, but even more economics-y, is that you're effectively, you would price in your future behaviour by sort of effect, well, it's more or less the same, but you price it so that you'd be buying and selling experiences to your future self. I haven't worked out how that's going to work, but the point is that you're never allowed to do anything. You're only allowed to buy the opportunity for your future self to do stuff. To take futures. Yeah. Yeah. So you're basically... I thought you mean a wildcard allocation. You're futurising everything. Right. So if I want a pizza, I don't get to eat it. Me, in three days time, gets to eat it. Right. And in three days time, well, I'll be going, well, where's the rest of my pizza? But no, because I can't. I literally can't do that. I have to. So I'm saying the solution is that basically your ability to consume things has to have a significant enough lag that you no longer consider it something happening to you.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So it's Peter's example. I think it's a special case of that. Yeah. I think that's basically all of the world's problems solved. How does it work? How do we actually get it to happen? I've got no idea. Yeah. Well, look, two things. Nor do I.
Speaker A:But I'm a little bit worried, actually, in the office. I can see problems, right, with the non-cake eaters who just never eat it at all, going, well, either they're having fun or I'm just a bit excluded from this. And two, they're spending too much time in this whole cake business. I think it's taking up too many resources.
Speaker D:We've devoted this entire bureaucratic division to managing cake coming into the office. Yeah, you know, so I'm a bit worried about that side of things.
Speaker B:But it's compensated for by the fact that everyone is happier and healthier. And they still get to eat cakes if that's what they, in inverted commas, really want. Yeah. But, you know, but it's stopping them eating too much because their monkey brain is in control.
Speaker A:Yeah. Anyway, second thing. I'm slightly disheartened when we've cited here Adam and Eve. We've cited Ulysses. They were around quite a long time ago, right? And I can't help but feel a thousand years from now that there might be whatever the thousand year from now equivalent of a podcast is that there might be people discussing this same thing about cake and temptation. And I can't help but feel this will always be an issue.
Speaker B:Well, in a way, I think a lot of the great problems, I mean, we've talked about how fundamental this is, this problem, this conflict between you and your consequences. But would life be too boring without it? I mean, you know, actually, is there something to be said for giving into temptation? And in fact, by bringing the cake. See, I mean, so from a purely, strictly kind of economic perspective, you would say that the concept of there being two yous fighting it out or whatever just doesn't really make much sense. You're one thing and you choose to do things. And at the point that you're eating that cake, that's what you wanted. You are better off as a result of eating that cake right now than not eating the cake. And you're fooling yourself. Tomorrow, yeah, you might wish that you hadn't eaten the cake. But that's because tomorrow you, the selfish bastard, he's not actually enjoying the cake and he wants you to stop having your fun and enjoying your cake. There's no fun. Yeah. So the point is that, yes, future you is dealing with a lot of temptation.
Speaker A:Figured it out. Right. So you actually work in two offices. Yeah. Right. And you alternate week by week or even day by day. Right. Okay. One office is the, you know, where there are some rules, whatever they may or may not be, how they're applied. There are rules. Okay. The, you know, curb your behavior. The other office is, you know, yeah, the fun office where you can smoke, you can drink, take cocaine, you can do whatever you want. Go for it. Okay. And quite simply, you alternate week by week. Right. That's it. Right. Everyone's like your two sides are evenly.
Speaker D:I can see that working. My solution is simpler. Basically you eat cake all the time. Right. Constantly from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, but just tiny amounts of it. Okay. I think there's evidence. So a crumb every minute.
Speaker B:Yeah. There is actually a diet, isn't there? But I think it's called like the fingernail diet where you every minute you eat something the size of your fingernail or something like that. But yeah, I think the, yeah, the problem there is that you wouldn't ever get the pleasure. But I wonder if reducing, it has a similar effect to my idea of kind of trying to pump things into the future because you just are not, you're never able to be tempted because all you've got is another crumb. I mean, it doesn't sound great. No.
Speaker D:Occasionally you might get a slightly chocolatey. Yeah, you get a chocolate chip.
Speaker A:On that note actually, just to round us off, I've got a question. Are you a cake person? And if so, what's your cake? Go for it. Anybody. I'll kick us off actually. I'm actually not much of a cake person. I'm all your crisps and peanuts. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. If there's cake about, I'll have it. Yeah, sure. But, which actually, so I really would be helped by these rules because I'm actually not that into, I'm not going to actively go out and seek cake. But if there's cake there, I will have it. Favourite cake? I like, I quite like carrot cake, actually. I really like carrot cake, which is nicer than it sounds, I think carrot cake. Yeah. I only like one cake. Yeah, so Nick, so you're not really a cake guy?
Speaker B:Well, I mean, I will, I like you, I will eat other cakes. I just don't, I would never be motivated to go out of my way to have one. Right. But there's one cake that I do enjoy and it's a blessing, really. It's not the kind of cake anyone ever brings in the office. Is it a wedding cake or something? You can't eat it with your fingers. No, it's a cheesecake.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:And I love, cheesecake is the only cake I really get excited about. It's not really a cake though, is it? Well, okay. Well, I mean, I love cheesecake. But the point is you have to eat it with a plate and a knife and fork, really. So that's good because nobody ever brings in a cheesecake they've made and people help themselves. It just doesn't work like that. Unless it's a baked cheesecake. Well, yes, which I do love. I love a good baked cheesecake. Yeah. Peter?
Speaker D:Yeah, no, I don't actively seek cake. I'm thinking if I went to a National Trust kind of cafe and there's cake, I'll have it. Right. But if there's cake and sandwiches, I'll probably go for a sandwich. Always the sandwiches. Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. I'd actually just finish this off. Top 10 taste in terms of food. For me, it's got to be either dry roast peanuts or bacon fries, I think they're called. Really? Yeah, I love that stuff. Pizza. Pizza. I can't stop eating pizza until the pizza's gone.
Speaker B:Yeah, there's no natural point at which you've had enough pizza. Yeah. Nick? Yeah, I would have put pizza's top, actually. I think I would find it. Well, there is actually interesting. This is something I'm interested in, obviously, diet as someone who's in inverted commas, struggled with their weight. We look into the evidence about the things that people eat. Yeah, pizza is right up there. It's got just about everything you want. It's the fat and the salt and the sugar and the carbs. But the things that people actually binge on are carbs, which is odd because you actually think the things you're really tempted by, what you really want is sugar and fat and stuff. But actually, the things that people sit down and just mindlessly eat forever are things like crisps and peanuts. But also like, yeah, chips. So I'd say probably, yeah, well, that's true. But I'd say chips, probably. Like the problem with chips, they're a bit like pizza. They're there and I'm not going to stop eating them until the bowl is empty.
Speaker D:I'm on the chips camp as well. The best part of any meal, which is something in chips, is always the chips.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, see, the trouble is now I've discovered, really, one of my tricks is to eat what I was going to eat anyway, but just don't have the rice or don't have the fries because you really don't miss out. While they're there, you are definitely going to eat them. But if they're not there, if you take out the bread or the chips or whatever, you get 90% of the fun, but without loads and loads of extra calories. So, yeah, which I think is interesting because you don't think of being really tempted by carbs and yet they are actually the thing you can kind of more or less eat forever. That's all I can think about right now. Right.
Speaker A:Yeah. OK, we better stop and go down the chip shop. OK, all right. That was lovely. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
