Making a rule for yourself is like making a rule for someone else, only that someone else is future you. If future you breaks your rules, just like if someone else breaks your rules (e.g. “don’t cheat on me”), that weakens the trust between the two of you, and you’ll find it harder to cooperate in the future. And it’s not much fun not being able to cooperate between your past and future selves: that means you can’t make plans expecting future you to follow through on them.
(“But darling, clearly the optimal strategy was to cheat this one time and then be faithful the rest of the time...”)
And on the flip side of that, if past-you makes the rules so strict that they’re practically unfollowable for future-you, that also weakens the trust between the two of you, because future-you will perceive past-you as tyrannical and be less inclined to trust that the rule was actually a good idea in the first place (and therefore be less likely to follow the rules it percieves as not-so-good). So past-you has to earn the trust of future-you by making rules it expects future-you to be able to follow, and future-you has to earn the trust of past-you by following the rules past-you makes.
Yes, exactly. You can get a lot of mileage out of importing intuitions from how to build trust between people to how to build trust between your past and future selves. (For example there’s an interesting analogy between labels in romantic relationships and personal identity.)
Making a rule for yourself is like making a rule for someone else, only that someone else is future you. If future you breaks your rules, just like if someone else breaks your rules (e.g. “don’t cheat on me”), that weakens the trust between the two of you, and you’ll find it harder to cooperate in the future. And it’s not much fun not being able to cooperate between your past and future selves: that means you can’t make plans expecting future you to follow through on them.
(“But darling, clearly the optimal strategy was to cheat this one time and then be faithful the rest of the time...”)
And on the flip side of that, if past-you makes the rules so strict that they’re practically unfollowable for future-you, that also weakens the trust between the two of you, because future-you will perceive past-you as tyrannical and be less inclined to trust that the rule was actually a good idea in the first place (and therefore be less likely to follow the rules it percieves as not-so-good). So past-you has to earn the trust of future-you by making rules it expects future-you to be able to follow, and future-you has to earn the trust of past-you by following the rules past-you makes.
Yes, exactly. You can get a lot of mileage out of importing intuitions from how to build trust between people to how to build trust between your past and future selves. (For example there’s an interesting analogy between labels in romantic relationships and personal identity.)
That’s a fascinating way to think about it.