Reminds me a bit of the LW (ab)use of Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, heh—at least with a future self you’ve got a high likelihood of shared priors.
Anyway, I know arguments from practicality are typically missing the point in philosophical arguments, but this seems to be especially useless—even granting the principle, under what circumstance could you become aware of your future beliefs with sufficient confidence to change your current beliefs based on such?
It seems to boil down mostly to “If you’re pretty sure you’re going to change your mind, get it over with”. Am I missing something here?
Well, that’s one of my many issues with the principle—it’s practically useless, except in situations that it has to be formulated specifically to avoid. For instance, if you plan to get drunk, you might know that you’ll consider yourself a safe driver while you are (in the future) drunk, but that doesn’t mean you should now consider your future, drunk self a safe driver. Sophisticated statements of Reflection explicitly avoid situations like this.
Reminds me a bit of the LW (ab)use of Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, heh—at least with a future self you’ve got a high likelihood of shared priors.
Anyway, I know arguments from practicality are typically missing the point in philosophical arguments, but this seems to be especially useless—even granting the principle, under what circumstance could you become aware of your future beliefs with sufficient confidence to change your current beliefs based on such?
It seems to boil down mostly to “If you’re pretty sure you’re going to change your mind, get it over with”. Am I missing something here?
Well, that’s one of my many issues with the principle—it’s practically useless, except in situations that it has to be formulated specifically to avoid. For instance, if you plan to get drunk, you might know that you’ll consider yourself a safe driver while you are (in the future) drunk, but that doesn’t mean you should now consider your future, drunk self a safe driver. Sophisticated statements of Reflection explicitly avoid situations like this.