I don’t get one thing—the violation of Guaranteed Payoffs in case of precommitment. If I understand correctly, the claim is: if you precommit to pay while on desert, then you “burn value for certain” while in the city. But you can only “burn value” / violate Guaranteed Payoffs when you make a decision, and if you successfully precommited before, then you’re no longer making any decision in the city—you just go to the ATM and pay, because that’s literally the only thing you can do.
That seems like a useful framing to me. I think the main issue is just that often, we don’t think of commitment as literally closing off choice—e.g., it’s still a “choice” to keep a promise. But if you do think of it as literally closing off choice then yes, you can avoid the violation of Guaranteed Payoffs, at least in cases where you’ve actually already made the commitment in question.
often, we don’t think of commitment as literally closing off choice—e.g., it’s still a “choice” to keep a promise
For what it’s worth, if a “commitment” is of this form, I struggle to see what the motivation for paying in Parfit’s hitchhiker would be. The “you want to be the sort of person who pays” argument doesn’t do anything for me, because that’s answering a different question than “should you choose to pay [insofar as you have a ‘choice’]?” I worry there’s a motte-and-bailey between different notions of “commitment” going on. I’d be curious for your reactions to my thoughts on this here.
Hey, this post is great—thank you.
I don’t get one thing—the violation of Guaranteed Payoffs in case of precommitment. If I understand correctly, the claim is: if you precommit to pay while on desert, then you “burn value for certain” while in the city. But you can only “burn value” / violate Guaranteed Payoffs when you make a decision, and if you successfully precommited before, then you’re no longer making any decision in the city—you just go to the ATM and pay, because that’s literally the only thing you can do.
What am I missing?
That seems like a useful framing to me. I think the main issue is just that often, we don’t think of commitment as literally closing off choice—e.g., it’s still a “choice” to keep a promise. But if you do think of it as literally closing off choice then yes, you can avoid the violation of Guaranteed Payoffs, at least in cases where you’ve actually already made the commitment in question.
For what it’s worth, if a “commitment” is of this form, I struggle to see what the motivation for paying in Parfit’s hitchhiker would be. The “you want to be the sort of person who pays” argument doesn’t do anything for me, because that’s answering a different question than “should you choose to pay [insofar as you have a ‘choice’]?” I worry there’s a motte-and-bailey between different notions of “commitment” going on. I’d be curious for your reactions to my thoughts on this here.
That makes sense—thx!