I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unit

I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unitary nature of preference. I want to eat the cookie and I want to be thin. The fact that I eat the cookie does not actually mean that I want the cookie "more" than I want to be thin. It just means that preference functions are not consistent over time. My preference over the next 5 minutes is not the same as my preference for what to do with the collection of all of my 5 minutes over the course of my life. You can prove this with a simple thought experiment. Almost everyone on earth has some vice or bad habit that they'd like to break if they could, or some better behavior they'd like to do if they could. What that means is that for those people, if they could take a side-effect free pill to change their brain to behave in that way, they would. If that's true, it's clear that the consistency of preferences is falsified. Once you accept this, I think it recasts how we ought to think about technology, and social architecture. The implications of this are that, probably in general, we want to allow people to architect their environment to conform to their longer term executive preferences, rather than imposing an environment tailored to their shorter term instinctual ones. Notably this does not mean imposing this environment on them. If people want to read clickbait they should be allowed to. But I think most people, if they had a "filter clickbait bullshit journalism from my life" button, they would press that button. Those same people (myself included), will also happily click on a perfectly tailored to my hot buttons headline. This is not a contradiction, and people shouldn't be shamed for it. The promise of technology in this domain is to engage executive preferences by providing intentional, tailored environments for people. If you can give me the option not to be exposed to click bait, i'll take it. If you can give me the option not to be exposed to sugary snacks, i'll take that too. I'm hopeful that technology and media will start to move in this direction, because I think it'd be a really significant improvement.