if you are able to follow through on the respective actions you precommitted to
If I had that much willpower, I’d just do (or not do, if that’s my true net preference) the thing.
There are no such situations I can think of where an explicit outside randomness helps me. The classic uses of a mixed strategy (where the adversary is strategically optimizing against your intent) don’t apply here.
Why I think what is? That this intervention doesn’t help? Because if I don’t want to do something, and I think I can get away with not doing it, I think that will STILL BE THE CASE after I roll a die. For me, at least (I acknowledge that it may work for others, which is great), I care far less about a statement of intent to obey a random event than I care about the actual behavior. Adding the die roll does not add any information or decision weight.
Definitely I’m confused—I don’t see how the die roll helps, over just deciding to do or not do the thing. I think you’re describing a decision about whether to commit to something, prior to the actual behavior of doing it (which is a decision as well, though I’m not sure whether you agree on that point). Your description is of a decision to assign an external probability source to the commitment portion of the sequence. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t prefer to just decide.
I think remain most confused by
But it is NOT okay, to decrease that chance to 0
I don’t understand why it’s OK to commit to a small chance of doing something I don’t want to, but why it’s not OK to just not do it (colloquial 0%. Bayesian arbitrary small chance, as circumstances can change).
I think an existence proof would help—what decisions or actions has this worked for for you? How did you pick the odds to use? I can’t think of any decisions where I expect it to help me in any way (except certain adversarial games where mixed strategies are optimal, but those are incredibly rare in the real world).
If I had that much willpower, I’d just do (or not do, if that’s my true net preference) the thing.
There are no such situations I can think of where an explicit outside randomness helps me. The classic uses of a mixed strategy (where the adversary is strategically optimizing against your intent) don’t apply here.
Removed.
Why I think what is? That this intervention doesn’t help? Because if I don’t want to do something, and I think I can get away with not doing it, I think that will STILL BE THE CASE after I roll a die. For me, at least (I acknowledge that it may work for others, which is great), I care far less about a statement of intent to obey a random event than I care about the actual behavior. Adding the die roll does not add any information or decision weight.
Removed.
Definitely I’m confused—I don’t see how the die roll helps, over just deciding to do or not do the thing. I think you’re describing a decision about whether to commit to something, prior to the actual behavior of doing it (which is a decision as well, though I’m not sure whether you agree on that point). Your description is of a decision to assign an external probability source to the commitment portion of the sequence. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t prefer to just decide.
I think remain most confused by
I don’t understand why it’s OK to commit to a small chance of doing something I don’t want to, but why it’s not OK to just not do it (colloquial 0%. Bayesian arbitrary small chance, as circumstances can change).
I think an existence proof would help—what decisions or actions has this worked for for you? How did you pick the odds to use? I can’t think of any decisions where I expect it to help me in any way (except certain adversarial games where mixed strategies are optimal, but those are incredibly rare in the real world).