The Noddy problem

JERRY (SEINFELD): I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I'm Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. 'What about getting up after five hours sleep?', oh that's Morning Guy's problem. That's not my problem, I'm Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you're ..... (?), you're exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There's nothing Morning Guy can do. The only Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.

You can punish and intimidate your future self, as you can see.

So awfully true.

With school just getting back in, I find myself continuously saying "I'll do my work at X o'clock" where X is always multiple hours in the future, and then when I get to that time, I find myself saying the same thing. It's like I forget that my future self is just like me.

So that this comment has more than epsilon information, I'll also provide the heuristic I'm going to use this semester. Hopefully it works, etc., etc.:
Every time I find myself pushing the "get to work time" on my future self, assume I will not work at all that day. Maybe this motivates me to work immediately, maybe not. If not, at least I don't get the guilt and stress of deluding myself into thinking I'll get to work X hours from now.

this is literally the best solution I could think of

It seems to be a problem of "desired processes" vs "goals". Picking Martha Monkey up from the station is a goal, while playing outside is a desired process. If one Noddy picks up Martha Monkey from the station, all of the Noddys' desires for Martha to be back from the station are fulfilled. However, if a Noddy plays outside, this only fulfills that Noddy's desire to play outside.

This looks a lot like the "tragedy of the commons" idea so often referred to in economics, when framed in the sense of multiple simultaneous instances of the same person. This is the first time I have really understood how TDT works.

There was also a Calvin and Hobbes storyline in which Calvin, not wanting to do his homework, makes a time machine and travels a few hours into the future so he can collect his already-done homework and take it back with him. Of course, when he arrives in to the future, the homework still isn't done, because he spent the time between then and now goofing off...

See also Multiplicity (1996) - trailer.

Nice illustration. It also lends itself to drawing an analogy between a solution to the Noddy Problem and real life akrasia. In the Noddy problem, the obvious solution is to make sure that the duplicate is not identical (or rather, that their environment is not close enough to yours in the relevant ways). One way to do this is by changing incentives -- you know that you would pick up Noddy if your life depended on it, so you can create a duplicate that believes that it will explode if they don't do the job. In the real world, you can apply the same sort of solution by using self-binding to coerce your future selves into doing your bidding.

Another similar point is made in the xkcd on cryogenics.

Or, of course, http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1542#comic