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saturn comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 - Less Wrong
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In a situation where other people can predict your future decisions, you can reason as if your decisions have backward causality, because they were predicted before you carried them out. It's a generalization of the concept of making credible threats and promises.
But in a situation where other people can predict my future behavior, I can instead reason as if some earlier state causes both my behavior and their prediction.
This seems to get me all the same explanatory and predictive power in an entirely straightforward fashion. Making credible threats and promises seems entirely unproblematic when looked at that way.
I accept that some awfully smart people who have thought about this a lot have concluded that this sort of backward-causality reasoning really does buy them something, and I'm open to the possibility that it's something worth buying. But at the moment I don't see what it could possibly be.
You can explain and predict decisions as being implied by their antecedents, but you can't use the same reasoning in the act of making a decision, because it leads to contradictions. This post contains the best explanation I could find.