Yes, you might want to precommit to it. But you don't want to precommit against it, which is Eliezer's point. In the parallel example (Newcombe's box), you do want to precommit against the thing which seems to strictly dominate, and the difference between the two cases is the justification for treating time-invariance as important.
Ok, hah, I don't think we disagree on anything here. I think I made a mistake in reading "has no reason to precommit himself to avoiding gum" as "has no reason to precommit himself [to anything]". My bad. Thanks for helping out!
I have not seen any place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's new paper, titled Timeless Decision Theory, so I decided to create a discussion post. (Have I missed an already existing post or discussion?)