First of all, thanks for this post—I think it’s really valuable to get a realistic sense of how these beliefs play out over the long term.
Like others in the comments, though, I’m a little critical of the framing and skeptical of the role of commitment devices. In my mind, we can view commitment devices as essentially being anti-cooperative with our future selves. I think we should default to viewing these attempts as suspicious, similarly to how we would caution against acting anti-cooperatively towards any other non-EAs.
Implicit is the assumption that if we change, it must be for “bad” reasons. It’s natural enough—clearly we can’t think of any good reasons, otherwise we would already have changed—but it lacks imagination. We may learn of a reason why things are not as we thought. Limiting your options according to your current knowledge or preferences means limiting your ability to flourish if the world turns out to be very different from your expectations.
More abstractly, imagine that you heard about someone who believed that doing X was a really good idea, and then three years later, believed that doing X was not a good idea. Without any more details, who do you think is most likely to be correct?
(At the same time, I think we’re all familiar with failing to achieve goals because we failed to commit to them, even as we knew they were worth it, so there can be value in binding yourself. It’s also good signalling, of course. But such explanations or justifications need to be strong enough to overcome the general prior based on the above argument.)
First of all, thanks for this post—I think it’s really valuable to get a realistic sense of how these beliefs play out over the long term.
Like others in the comments, though, I’m a little critical of the framing and skeptical of the role of commitment devices. In my mind, we can view commitment devices as essentially being anti-cooperative with our future selves. I think we should default to viewing these attempts as suspicious, similarly to how we would caution against acting anti-cooperatively towards any other non-EAs.
Implicit is the assumption that if we change, it must be for “bad” reasons. It’s natural enough—clearly we can’t think of any good reasons, otherwise we would already have changed—but it lacks imagination. We may learn of a reason why things are not as we thought. Limiting your options according to your current knowledge or preferences means limiting your ability to flourish if the world turns out to be very different from your expectations.
More abstractly, imagine that you heard about someone who believed that doing X was a really good idea, and then three years later, believed that doing X was not a good idea. Without any more details, who do you think is most likely to be correct?
(At the same time, I think we’re all familiar with failing to achieve goals because we failed to commit to them, even as we knew they were worth it, so there can be value in binding yourself. It’s also good signalling, of course. But such explanations or justifications need to be strong enough to overcome the general prior based on the above argument.)