Thanks to @eigengender and especially Chris Lakin and Simon Dima for valuable comments on a draft.

In this post, I will present an alternate framing[1] of LessWrong-style decision theory. I believe it should make its concrete recommendations much more palatable to people who find them absurd. Very little of the theoretical substance here is original to me, and the core claim will be obvious to many, but I don’t think anyone has cleanly framed it all like this for easy consumption.

TLDR: Framing the thorny issues of decision theory[2] as stemming from a novel, non-decision-theoretic consideration (something like “cooperating with your past self”) - instead of forcing the relevant intuitions and claims into a decision theory frame - is much less counterintuitive, and gives the exact same recommendations.

(If you want to immediately skip to why I believe past attempts to incorporate LessWrong-style intuitions into standard decision theory are insufficient, go here)

Introduction

Let's briefly check out Will MacAskill's “Bomb*” scenario[3]:

You’re alone at home at the end of the universe. Omega - an amazing predictor of human behavior, but long since dead - gave you one last challenge. You face two boxes, Left and Right. You must take [...]

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Outline:

(01:07) Introduction

(05:42) The great commitment

(09:14) Commitment theory

(09:56) FDT

(11:24) A detailed example

(19:08) Conclusion

The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 8th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w9vQNTSm7dthgathH/reframing-lesswrong-style-decision-theory-as-commitment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Treutlein (2023) defining a bargaining solution for acausally correlated players in a Bayesian game.

Wei Dai (2010) fiddling with the implementation of the concept of updatelessness.

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“Reframing LessWrong-style decision theory as “commitment theory”” by Elias Schmied

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Reframing LessWrong-style decision theory as “commitment theory”” by Elias Schmied