I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying this *will* happen for xyz nonsense axiomatic reason. I’m saying that, as an individual making decisions, you should act as if everybody *can* “lower their time preference through learned self-restraint,” even if that may not be true.

in fact I’d go further and say that successful group dynamics and the resolution of collective action problems to a large extent depends on it: people only cooperate and restrain from negative-sum violence at all when there is reason to believe that meaningful trust can create a positive-sum outcome. if you don’t believe you will be treated fairly because you are just a high-time preference idiot/idler/whatever then you won’t develop or reciprocate any trust. hence for those who are low-time preference clever/industrious/whatever, the moral thing to do is to act as if this (probably to some extent true) underlying distribution is actually false.

I’d even go as far as to say that civilisation depends on the self-fulfilling inertia of this choice continuing to be made by a majority, if not a supermajority.