If you have a difficult time predicting what you will want and how you will feel, it becomes difficult to calculate the utility of any given precomittment.
I worry about making precommitments for many of the reasons you bring up; our natural tendency toward hyperbolic discounting makes sense when we need to reason in the face of uncertain risks. But I have found that when I focus on long term uncertainty I tend to lock myself into my current behavior even if it works against my current goals.
It would seem that deciding to be a TDT agent is deciding to always be predictable in certain ways. But that also requires trusting that future you will want to stick to that decision.
To avoid the uncertainty inherent in making a commitment, my approach is about how to make a choice for right now—based on my current goals. By choosing to not eat a donut right now, I am not deciding anything about my behavior tomorrow. Tomorrow I may have to repeat the same process of reasoning; if my state tomorrow is similar to my state today I will probably make the same choice, but if it isn’t similar I may make a different choice. No guilt, no fuss.
I am using my assumption—that I will always make the same choice in similar circumstances—to help scope and quantify the consequences of my alternatives. In the case of my example it allows me to scale the consequences to a level I can more easily compare to my goals. In a year I want to weigh 10 lbs less than now so eating 13 lbs of calories as donuts appears to work against that goal.
This approach allows me to make an immediate decision which supports my long term goals, while only experiencing the actual risk of this specific choice, and not the combined risk of all similar future choices. If I discover unexpected negative consequences from this choice then my state will be changed; which I will take into account the next time I face similar circumstances. For example if I discover that not eating a 180 calorie donut in the morning leads to me eating 300 additional lunch and dinner calories, then clearly I will start choosing to eat donuts in the morning. But in fact I discovered that the opposite was generally true; when I ate a donut in the morning I tended to eat 200-300 more calories during the rest of the day.
If I knew exactly what the effects of action EAT DONUT vs NOT EAT DONUT were (including mental duress, alternative pitfalls to avoid, etc), then I would be better able to pick a strategy.
By lowering my perceived exposure to risk I felt free to experiment; this allowed me to collect the knowledge I needed to make the best choice for me, for now. I found that weight gain was a real consequence of eating donuts, and not just because of donut calories. I found that I would start to feel groggy a couple hours after eating a donut. I found that I couldn’t just eat donuts occasionally; if I ate donuts on some mornings I would begin to crave them until I ate them every morning. These cravings would last for days after I stopped eating them—often triggered by context and not just hunger—indicating some form of addiction. The biggest negative consequence to not eating donuts was that I had to manage the daily temptation and the associated automatic behavior. At first I had to repeat my reasoning multiple times a day; but now I only have to do it occasionally—there are many days that I don’t even notice or think about the donuts.
I worry about making precommitments for many of the reasons you bring up; our natural tendency toward hyperbolic discounting makes sense when we need to reason in the face of uncertain risks. But I have found that when I focus on long term uncertainty I tend to lock myself into my current behavior even if it works against my current goals.
To avoid the uncertainty inherent in making a commitment, my approach is about how to make a choice for right now—based on my current goals. By choosing to not eat a donut right now, I am not deciding anything about my behavior tomorrow. Tomorrow I may have to repeat the same process of reasoning; if my state tomorrow is similar to my state today I will probably make the same choice, but if it isn’t similar I may make a different choice. No guilt, no fuss.
I am using my assumption—that I will always make the same choice in similar circumstances—to help scope and quantify the consequences of my alternatives. In the case of my example it allows me to scale the consequences to a level I can more easily compare to my goals. In a year I want to weigh 10 lbs less than now so eating 13 lbs of calories as donuts appears to work against that goal.
This approach allows me to make an immediate decision which supports my long term goals, while only experiencing the actual risk of this specific choice, and not the combined risk of all similar future choices. If I discover unexpected negative consequences from this choice then my state will be changed; which I will take into account the next time I face similar circumstances. For example if I discover that not eating a 180 calorie donut in the morning leads to me eating 300 additional lunch and dinner calories, then clearly I will start choosing to eat donuts in the morning. But in fact I discovered that the opposite was generally true; when I ate a donut in the morning I tended to eat 200-300 more calories during the rest of the day.
By lowering my perceived exposure to risk I felt free to experiment; this allowed me to collect the knowledge I needed to make the best choice for me, for now. I found that weight gain was a real consequence of eating donuts, and not just because of donut calories. I found that I would start to feel groggy a couple hours after eating a donut. I found that I couldn’t just eat donuts occasionally; if I ate donuts on some mornings I would begin to crave them until I ate them every morning. These cravings would last for days after I stopped eating them—often triggered by context and not just hunger—indicating some form of addiction. The biggest negative consequence to not eating donuts was that I had to manage the daily temptation and the associated automatic behavior. At first I had to repeat my reasoning multiple times a day; but now I only have to do it occasionally—there are many days that I don’t even notice or think about the donuts.