Given that in fact, you can eat or drink whatever you want whenever you want, how do you enforce the conditionality on yourself? Isn’t this an exercise in role-playing, and if so, how do you sustain the pretence?
you can eat or drink whatever you want whenever you want
Not quite. I don’t have any candy easily available to me (I suppose I could buy more, but that would be a pain), aside from what’s in the machine. Theoretically, I could eat that whenever I want, but I have some pretty strong incentives not to do so. I’ve precommitted to not taking any candy out, and I don’t want to break the precommitment (plus doing so would probably ruin the system forever). And, of course, there’s a very well-placed Schelling fence helping me stay honest, so it’s not even that hard.
Given that in fact, you can eat or drink whatever you want whenever you want, how do you enforce the conditionality on yourself? Isn’t this an exercise in role-playing, and if so, how do you sustain the pretence?
Not quite. I don’t have any candy easily available to me (I suppose I could buy more, but that would be a pain), aside from what’s in the machine. Theoretically, I could eat that whenever I want, but I have some pretty strong incentives not to do so. I’ve precommitted to not taking any candy out, and I don’t want to break the precommitment (plus doing so would probably ruin the system forever). And, of course, there’s a very well-placed Schelling fence helping me stay honest, so it’s not even that hard.