I’m accumulating evidence with beeminder.com and stickk.com has some evidence. I think this solution goes straight to the heart of what akrasia really is: a discrepancy between what you want to do and what you end up doing. If you have trouble following through on your intentions (and you’re sure they were the right intentions, even in hindsight) then don’t just intend, commit.
Vague claims that it increases chances mean nothing, as this group is already self-selected. Simple chance vs commitment size graph would go a long way towards establishing stickk-style commitments as viable.
Thanks for pushing back on this—good to hear this kind of skepticism.
So far beeminder’s evidence is basically anecdotal—people seem to stay on track with a commitment device and fall off the wagon again when that pressure is gone. You’re quite right about the self-selection problem.
I’m curious: do you yourself suffer from genuine akrasia? (I’m pretty sure Tyler Cowen doesn’t.)
Every time I failed to keep some GTD-ish system in proper order for any reason, my life immediately collapsed and nothing got done for weeks, even urgent things with supposedly severe consequences (from which I somehow got away in the end anyway, but that might be just luck), and with my mental state turning into some mixture of pointless stress and fuck-it-all.
Most of the time, there’s plenty of things I sort of intend to do but never quite get to, but they tend to be not especially severe.
As far as I can tell, the only thing any threat of punishment would do to me would be add to the stress, reduce my mental energy, and make me more miserable overall.
Ah, I would say you’re not genuinely akratic then. Consider these three questions about some hypothetical goal you have:
How sure are you that you want to do this?
How sure are you that you can do this?
How sure are you that you will do this?
If your answers are “totally”, “absolutely”, and “given historical evidence, not entirely” then it’s genuine akrasia and you should self-bind. It may add to the stress but it will force the thing that needs to happen to happen.
For example, if you regularly let your GTD-ish system fall out of order then that—keeping it in order—could make a ton of sense to self bind on. If there’s some minimal daily effort that prevents weeks of stress and pain (and, hypothetically, you irrationally allow that to happen often) then the stress of the self-binding is probably totally worth it. It’s like paying an insurance premium against screwing yourself over.
Note that the use of self-binding is technically blatantly irrational so for a non-akratic it makes sense that it seems simply crazy.
David Allen claims that most people’s GTD-ish systems fall out of order every now and again, and this is to be expected, various real changes in life require changes to the system, rethinking of personal priorities etc., but we’re pretty bad at spotting them pre-emptively.
I think noticing such problems earlier would be very helpful to me, and I tend to come back on track faster than in the past, but I’m still not terribly happy about it.
My most common akrasia-like problem is frequent gross misestimation of available time when I have high mental energy—most tasks compete for this, and amount I have is unpredictable, but not random, and I haven’t figured out makes my mental energy more or less plentiful. Some minor correlates are higher room temperature (26-28C range seems optimal), more physical exercise during the last week or two, fewer distractions, cleaner room where I work, frequent naps, and better maintained GTD system. These are pretty solid, but that’s still not enough to explain most of variance.
I cannot think of any recent akrasia related to anything that didn’t require high mental energy levels, except during some GTD breakdowns.
I’m accumulating evidence with beeminder.com and stickk.com has some evidence. I think this solution goes straight to the heart of what akrasia really is: a discrepancy between what you want to do and what you end up doing. If you have trouble following through on your intentions (and you’re sure they were the right intentions, even in hindsight) then don’t just intend, commit.
I’m with Tyler Cowen here that this is very unlikely to work. Lack of quality data on success percentages on both stickk.com and beeminder.com suggests to me they don’t really work—they have both data, and incentive (including short term financial incentive) to compile such data, but never bothered.
Vague claims that it increases chances mean nothing, as this group is already self-selected. Simple chance vs commitment size graph would go a long way towards establishing stickk-style commitments as viable.
Thanks for pushing back on this—good to hear this kind of skepticism. So far beeminder’s evidence is basically anecdotal—people seem to stay on track with a commitment device and fall off the wagon again when that pressure is gone. You’re quite right about the self-selection problem.
I’m curious: do you yourself suffer from genuine akrasia? (I’m pretty sure Tyler Cowen doesn’t.)
What is “genuine akrasia”?
Every time I failed to keep some GTD-ish system in proper order for any reason, my life immediately collapsed and nothing got done for weeks, even urgent things with supposedly severe consequences (from which I somehow got away in the end anyway, but that might be just luck), and with my mental state turning into some mixture of pointless stress and fuck-it-all.
Most of the time, there’s plenty of things I sort of intend to do but never quite get to, but they tend to be not especially severe.
As far as I can tell, the only thing any threat of punishment would do to me would be add to the stress, reduce my mental energy, and make me more miserable overall.
Ah, I would say you’re not genuinely akratic then. Consider these three questions about some hypothetical goal you have:
How sure are you that you want to do this?
How sure are you that you can do this?
How sure are you that you will do this?
If your answers are “totally”, “absolutely”, and “given historical evidence, not entirely” then it’s genuine akrasia and you should self-bind. It may add to the stress but it will force the thing that needs to happen to happen.
For example, if you regularly let your GTD-ish system fall out of order then that—keeping it in order—could make a ton of sense to self bind on. If there’s some minimal daily effort that prevents weeks of stress and pain (and, hypothetically, you irrationally allow that to happen often) then the stress of the self-binding is probably totally worth it. It’s like paying an insurance premium against screwing yourself over.
Note that the use of self-binding is technically blatantly irrational so for a non-akratic it makes sense that it seems simply crazy.
David Allen claims that most people’s GTD-ish systems fall out of order every now and again, and this is to be expected, various real changes in life require changes to the system, rethinking of personal priorities etc., but we’re pretty bad at spotting them pre-emptively.
I think noticing such problems earlier would be very helpful to me, and I tend to come back on track faster than in the past, but I’m still not terribly happy about it.
My most common akrasia-like problem is frequent gross misestimation of available time when I have high mental energy—most tasks compete for this, and amount I have is unpredictable, but not random, and I haven’t figured out makes my mental energy more or less plentiful. Some minor correlates are higher room temperature (26-28C range seems optimal), more physical exercise during the last week or two, fewer distractions, cleaner room where I work, frequent naps, and better maintained GTD system. These are pretty solid, but that’s still not enough to explain most of variance.
I cannot think of any recent akrasia related to anything that didn’t require high mental energy levels, except during some GTD breakdowns.