The Volunteer's Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer's_dilemma) is in essence the Prisoner's Dilemma with more players - which means that defection is an even more dominant strategy. The problem is that the decision whether to do unpleasant tasks becomes a Volunteer's Dilemma with multiple future selves as my competition
Ah, interesting; I was recently trying to think about procrastination in terms of defecting against your future self in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, but this makes more sense.
Of course the standard causal reasoning would say to defect (actually, if you have a sufficiently low estimate of the probability that anyone else will cooperate, I guess it would say to cooperate), but TDT-like reasoning should allow acausal coordination to get an average of one cooperator (or however many are needed). At a Bay Area LW meetup last year, I was in a discussion (well, mostly just listening to a discussion) about the Luring Lottery. Someone, I think it was Nick Tarleton, concluded that in a Luring Lottery of n TDT agents each trying to maximize its own winnings, assuming each one knows how many other players there are and that the others are also TDT agents, each would pseudorandomly choose with probability 1/n to submit one entry, or to submit zero otherwise. (I may be misremembering the details, but it was along those lines.) A similar strategy would probably apply in a Volunteer's Dilemma among TDT agents.
So perhaps we could reduce procrastination by taking TDT sufficiently seriously! If there's one situation that merits the assumption that multiple agents are strongly correlated (and/or can very reliably predict each other), it's where all the agents are slightly delayed versions of yourself. (That was the original context in which I was thinking about this; real-world results pending.)
This has been bothering me ever since I started trying to use rationalist techniques to make better decisions (like anti-akrasia ones). The only field related to rationality I knew much about was game theory, but to my disappointment basic game theory has only increased my problems due to a certain formulation I can't abandon.
The Volunteer's Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer's_dilemma) is in essence the Prisoner's Dilemma with more players - which means that defection is an even more dominant strategy. The problem is that the decision whether to do unpleasant tasks becomes a Volunteer's Dilemma with multiple future selves as my competition - 4:00 tenshiko, 4:15 tenshiko, 4:30 tenshiko, and so on. Although the incentive to defect should decrease as time goes on, there's the problem of how 9:00 tenshiko can easily defect in an even more effective fashion and bring in 11:00 tenshiko and 11:15 tenshiko to further level the playing field. There is the further problem that, given how many of my current hobbies convert time to reward in an approximately cubic function, the incentive is high for 6:00 tenshiko, 7:00 tenshiko, and 8:00 tenshiko to form coalitions.
I guess what I'm really asking for is a more advanced matrix that represents the diminishing returns of bringing in other future selves, such as went-to-bed-at-1:00 tenshiko and completely-bombed-that-test-at-10:00 tenshiko, or at least the diminishing probability over time that "it doesn't matter, 9:45 tenshiko can take care of it".
If this goes well, I will probably try to flesh out the material received in responses with what I already know and produce a post in main discussing time management and its relation to game theory.