Yes, you might want to precommit to it. But you don’t want to precommit against it, which is Eliezer’s point. In the parallel example (Newcombe’s box), you do want to precommit against the thing which seems to strictly dominate, and the difference between the two cases is the justification for treating time-invariance as important.
Ok, hah, I don’t think we disagree on anything here. I think I made a mistake in reading “has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum” as “has no reason to precommit himself [to anything]”. My bad. Thanks for helping out!
Does he need to precommit to chew gum? I haven’t read the doc. in months, but I don’t recall their being any danger of temporal inconsistancy in that case.
Yes, you might want to precommit to it. But you don’t want to precommit against it, which is Eliezer’s point. In the parallel example (Newcombe’s box), you do want to precommit against the thing which seems to strictly dominate, and the difference between the two cases is the justification for treating time-invariance as important.
Ok, hah, I don’t think we disagree on anything here. I think I made a mistake in reading “has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum” as “has no reason to precommit himself [to anything]”. My bad. Thanks for helping out!
That would be quite important! =)
Does he need to precommit to chew gum? I haven’t read the doc. in months, but I don’t recall their being any danger of temporal inconsistancy in that case.
No he doesn’t. Eliezer compares this version of Solomon’s problem to the Newcomb’s problem, where precommitment actually makes a difference.