博士英语课文翻译Unit1

Unit1 Life and Wisdom

后来-关于我们自己拖延症告诉我们什么？由于它的潜在的非理性，拖延症被哲学家感兴趣

1 Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India,where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday. So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did.

1几年前，经济学家George Akerlof面临着一个简单的任务：从他居住的印度往美国寄一箱衣服。这些衣服是他的一个朋友兼同事Joseph Stiglitz来拜访他之后留下的，所以Akerlof着急把箱子寄回去。但是这里有一个问题：印度的官僚体系和Akerlof所宣称的“我在这些事情上的无能”使得这样做成为一件麻烦事——确实，他预计这将占去一整天时间，所以他一周又一周的推迟处理此事。这种情况一直持续了八个月之久，直到Akerlof自己都快要回美国了他才处理了这个问题：正好另外一个朋友也要寄一些东西回美国，于是Akerlof才得以把Stiglitz的衣服连带着一起捎回去。考虑到洲际邮件的不稳定性，Akerlof有可能比Stiglitz 的衣服早回到美国。

2 There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next mo rning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.

2这个故事让人感到一点欣慰：就连诺贝尔经济学奖获得者都会拖延！我们很多人的生活中都充满了很多未完成的任务，或大或小，一点一点吞噬着我们的良心。但是Akerlof将这些再熟悉不过的经历看成是一个谜。他真心想把箱子寄回给他的朋友，但是，就像他在1991年的论文《拖延症和顺从》中所说的那样“在那八个月里的每个早晨醒来之后我都决定在第二天早上把Stiglitz的箱子给寄回去”。他常常想要把箱子寄出去，但是那一刻从未降临。后来成为行为经济学的领军人物之一的Akerlof意识到拖延症不仅仅只是一个坏习惯。他认为这揭示了关于理性思维限制的一些重要问题，而这可能有助于我们理解像物质滥用和储蓄习惯等多种多样的现象。自从他的文章发表之后，关于拖延症的研究就变成了学术界的一个重要领域，哲学家、心理学家和经济学家都争相加入。

3 Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with f inishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

3学术界人士很长时间都在自我主导的形式下工作，有可能特别倾向于拖延：调查发现绝大部分大学生都有拖延现象，而涉及到拖延症的文章又往往以这是作者自身的问题而告终。（这篇文章也不例外）但就拖延

症的学术讨论并不仅仅是一些学术界人士试图合理化他们自己的懒惰。确实，拖延症研究的权威人物之一——经济学家George Ainslie在一篇文章中写道：拖延症“就像时间的形态一样根本，并且不妨就称之为基本冲动。”

4 Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear toreproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.

4 Ainslie所说的很有可能正确：拖延症是人类的一个基本冲动。但直到现代早期它才开始被当做一个重大问题来考虑。这个单词（来自于拉丁语，意思是“推迟到明天”）在16世纪进入英语，到18世纪，Samuel Johnson 把它描述成：每个人都多多少少具有的重大弱点之一。并且对他自己的这种倾向感到失望：“我无法克制地责备自己一直忽视那些不可避免的事情，并且每一刻的闲散都增加了我的痛苦。”而这个问题似乎一直在变的越来越糟糕。根据卡尔加里大学商业学教授Piers Steel的研究：从1978年到2002年，承认自己有拖延症困境的人数百分比翻了四番。从这个意义上说，把拖延症看做是一个现代社会典型的问题是有可能的。

5 It’s also a surprisingly costly one. Each year, Americans waste hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t file their taxes on time. The Harvard economist David Laibson has shown that American workers have forgone huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never got around to signing up for a retirement plan. Seventy per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma risk blindness because they don’t use their eyedrops regularly. Procrastination also inflict s major costs on businesses and governments. The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government’s dithe ring, and the decline of the American auto industry, exemplified by the bankruptcy of G.M., was due in part to executives’ penchant for delaying tough decisions.

5这个问题同时也是惊人的昂贵。每年，美国人都因为不能及时的报税而浪费上亿美元。哈佛大学的经济学家David Laibson已经发现：美国工人已经在401（K）退休储蓄计划中放弃了一大笔钱，只是因为他们从来没有时间签署退休协议。70%的青光眼患者宁愿冒着失明的危险也不愿意定期的用眼药水。拖延症还给商业和政府造成巨大的损失。近期的欧元危机就是因为德国政府的犹豫不决；以通用公司的破产为标志的美国汽车工业的下滑，部分原因是管理层对棘手问题的拖延。

6 Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—d oing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five percent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

6哲学家对拖延症感兴趣也有另外一个原因。它是希腊人称之为akrasia的一个有力的例证——做出有别于最佳判断的事。Piers Steel这样定义拖延症：自愿的推迟某事，尽管你知道这样做会使你更加难受。换一句话说，如果你只是简单的说“尽情的迟喝玩乐吧，因为明天我们就死了。”那么你就不是在拖延。如果你认

为那是最有效的利用时间的方法而有意的拖延，这也不算是拖延。拖延症的本质在于不去做你认为你该做的事，是一种造成人们心理负担的精神扭曲，这就是拖延症最令人困惑的地方：尽管它是在避免令人不高心的事，但是沉浸于其中也不会让人感到快乐。在一项研究中，65%的被调查学生在他们开始准备学期论文之前，表示希望避免拖延：他们既知道自己不会按时完成功课，也清楚这种拖延会让他们不高兴。

7Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

7这种怪异的非理性来自于我们和时间的关系——特别是一种经济学家所宣称的“双曲贴现”现象。一个两段实验给了我们一个经典的示例：在第一阶段，人们有两个选择，一个是今天得到100美元，另一个是明天得到110美元。在第二阶段，他们可以选择一个月之后得到100美元或一个月又一天之后得到110美元。实质上，这两个选择是完全等同的：多等一天，就可以多得10美元。然而，在第一阶段时很多人选择立即得到数目较小的那笔钱，而在第二阶段他们选择多等一天来得到额外的10美元。换句话说，双曲贴现者在考虑将来的时候能做出明智的选择，但是，由于现实的逼近，短期考虑压倒了他们的长期目标。类似的现象也出现在包括经济学家George Loewenstein在内的小组所进行的实验中，在实验中，人们被要求选择一部当晚观看的电影和一部第二天晚上观看的电影。对于前者，人们倾向于选择通俗喜剧和大片，但当他们在选择供以后观看的电影时，他们更可能选择严肃、重要的题材，这种选择一点也不奇怪。很显然，问题在于，当是时候观看一部严肃的电影时，另一部轻松一点的通常更具吸引力。这就是为什么我们的Netflix 中“想要观看”的影片序列里充满了从来没人看的片子：我们那更富责任感的自我把《卢旺达饭店》和《第七封印》加入了影片序列，但时机成熟的时候我们还是去了《宿醉》的首映。

8 The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.

8这些实验告诉我们人们不是目光短浅或肤浅，而是他们的偏好和时间没有保持一致。我们想看看Bergman 的杰作，想给我们自己足够的时间来写好一篇报告，想去为退休而存钱。但是随着它们由长期变成短期我们的希望发生了转变。

9 Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Ignorance migh t also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”

9为什么这会发生？一个普遍的答案是无知。Socrates相信akrasia所说的是绝对不可能的事情，因为我们自己不希望看到对我们自己不利的事情发生。如果我们的行动违背了我们的意志，那一定是因为我们不知道怎么做才是对的。相似的，通过像社会科学家Jon Elster所说的“计划谬误”，无知也作用于拖延症。Elster 认为人们低估了“完成一项特定任务所需要的时间，一部分原因是他们没有考虑到过去他们完成类似项目所花费的时间，另一方面他们依赖于没有意外发生的顺利情景。”

10 Still, ignorance can’t be the whole story. In the first place, we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs w hose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing. My apartment, for instance, has rarely looked tidier than it does at the moment. And people do learn from experience: procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and th ey want to resist them. They just don’t. A magazine editor I know, for instance, once had a writer tell her at noon on a Wednesday that the time-sensitive piece he was working on would be in her in-box by the time she got back from lunch. She did eventually get the piece—the following Tuesday. So a fuller explanation of procrastination really needs to take account of our attitudes to the tasks being avoided. A useful example can be found in the career of General George McClellan, who led the Army of the Potomac during the early years of the Civil War and was one of the greatest procrastinators of all time. When he took charge of the Union army, McClellan was considered a military genius, but he soon became famous for his chronic hesitancy. In 1862, despite a n excellent opportunity to take Richmond from Robert E. Lee’s men, with another Union army attacking in a pincer move, he dillydallied, convinced that he was blocked by hordes of Confederate soldiers, and missed his chance. Later that year, both before and after Antietam, he delayed again, squandering a two-to-one advantage over Lee’s troops. Afterward, Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck wrote, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”

10但是，无知并不是问题的全部。首先，我们经常拖延的不一定都是好玩的任务，而有可能是任何任务，他们唯一的诱惑在于他们不是那件我们必须完成的任务。比如说，我的公寓从来都是这么乱，一直得不到及时收拾。并且人们从经验中获知：拖延者们太清楚当下的诱惑，并且都想要抵制它，但就是无法做到。例如，一个我认识的杂志编辑，在一个周三的中午，被一个作家告知会在编辑吃完午饭回来之后将一篇具有时效性的稿子发到她的邮箱。结果，编辑收到稿子的时候已经是第二个星期的星期二了。所以，对拖延症完整的描述应该把我们对所躲避的任务的态度考虑进去。George McClellan的将军的生涯就是一个很好的例子。他在内战早期领导了Potomac军队，是历史上最伟大的拖延者之一。当接管联邦军的时候，他被认为是一个军事天才，但是很快他就因为长期的迟疑不决而出了名。在1862年，尽管有一个绝佳的机会和另一支军队左右夹击，从Robert E Lee的手中夺取Richmond，但他犹豫再三，认定自己已经被成堆的同盟军所围追堵截而失去了机会。在那一年的晚些时候，Antietam战役前后，他再次拖延，浪费了又一次与Lee 的军队对决的二对一的优势。后来，联邦军总将军Henry Halleck写道：“有一种超越任何人想象的惰性，只有Archimedes的杠杆才能撬动它。”

11 McClellan’s “immobility” highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. Although when he took over the Union army he told Lincoln “I can do it all,” he seems to have b een unsure that he could do anything. He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, “he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped.” Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. McClellan was also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.

11McClellan的惰性突出了我们拖延的若干经典原因。尽管在他接手联邦军的时候告诉林肯“我可以对付一切”，但他实际上并不是很确定自己真的可以做任何的事情。他总是在请求林肯给予新武器，并且，用一个观察者的话来说，“他觉得自己永远没有足够的士兵，士兵们永远不够训练有素，装备永远不够精良。”缺乏自信和不切实际的英雄主义成功幻想相互交替，常导致拖延症。不少研究显示很多拖延者都是自己给自

己找麻烦：不是去冒失败的风险，而是倾向于制造障碍使成功变的不可能——很显然，这种反应会制造一个恶性循环。MeClellan还沉迷于过度的计划，好像只有最理想的计划才值得付诸实践。拖延者常常屈服于这种完美主义。

12.Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of oursel ves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.

12这样看来，拖延者不再仅仅是无知那么简单，而是一个由懦弱、野心和内部冲突组成的混合体。但一些哲学家对这种应做之事和结果所做之事之间的分割有一个更加彻底的解释：制定计划要做和未能将其付诸实践的不是同一个人，而是被博弈理论家Thomas Schelling所称作的“分裂的自我”的不同部分。Schelling 建议我们把自己看做是各个不同的存在：为了得到控制权而相互打架、竞争和讨价还价。IanMcEwan回忆起他最近在写小说《太阳系》时的那种状态：“在进行重要决策的时候，内心可以被看做一个议会，一个辩论厅。不同派系相互竞争，短期与长期利益在相互仇视中确立自己的地位。不仅行动被搁置和阻挠，而且有些建议被提出来用以掩盖其他的建议，会议进行的迂回而激烈。”类似的，Otto von Bismarck说：“Faust 抱怨他心中有两个灵魂，而我心中藏匿着一群灵魂，并且不断争吵，就像是在一个共和国里。”从这个意义上说，对付拖延症的第一步不是承认你有问题，而是“你”们有问题。