Cofounder of Beeminder
dreeves
Karma: 587
I have a donation to the cause: the domain “pomochat.com”. (I owe the LessWrong community bigtime—I don’t think Beeminder would’ve gotten off the ground without it!)
I bequeath the domain with no strings attached. I can transfer ownership of the domain or just point it at wherever folks suggest. Assuming of course that no one comes up with a better domain!
Would you be interested in a session on anti-akrasia techniques for entrepreneurs? As the co-founder of Beeminder the danger would be that it would come off as a Beeminder infomercial. On the other hand, OMG BEEMINDER IS SO GREAT. Especially for surviving down cycles in the rollercoaster that is startupland, as we can attest from dogfooding the living crap out of Beeminder. Like our one-user-visible-improvement-per-day goal, which has kept us moving inexorably forward for 629 days now.
Here are 3 things that may convince you that this may be a good idea:
Katja Grace’s “On the Goodness of Beeminder”: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/08/on-the-goodness-of-beeminder.html
Robert Wiblin on beeminding your way to greatness: http://robertwiblin.com/2012/04/16/beeminding-your-way-to-greatness/
My own manifesto on “How to Do What You Want”: http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia and sequel on “Flexible Self-Control”: http://blog.beeminder.com/flexbind
(I just pitched that to the organizers and thought I’d repeat it here to gauge interest.)
There may be some overlap with the Overcoming Procrastination session, but this could be much more general.
Well said! Here’s how Bruce Schneier put it:
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.
I wrote an essay about the utter irrationality of “stranger danger” based on that quote: http://messymatters.com/strangers
Bethany and I philosophically bite the bullet on this, which is basically to just agree with your second point: the wealthy person gets their way all the time and the poor person gets what’s to them a lot of money and everyone is happy.
If that’s unpalatable or feels unfair then I think the principled solution is for the wealthy person to simply redress the unfairness with a lump sum payment to redistribute the wealth.
I don’t think it’s reasonable—ignoring all the psychology and social intricacies, as I’m wont to do [1] -- to object both to auctions with disparate wealth and to lump sum redistribution to achieve fairness.
Now that I’m introspecting, I suppose it’s the case that Bethany and I tend to seize excuses to redistribute wealth, but they have to be plausible ones.
It’s easy to make up excuses for why it might still be rational to go to the movie. Here’s how to factor all that out and cut to the real issue:
Scenario 1: You bought a $10 non-refundable ticket to a show. (And note that you definitely would not have done so if the show cost $20.) As you get to the theater you realize you lost your ticket. Luckily, they have more available, still at $10. Do you buy another ticket?
Scenario 2: You didn’t buy a ticket ahead of time. As you get to the theater you realize that $10 has fallen out of your pocket and is lost. Luckily, you still have enough to buy a ticket. Do you do so?
Everyone agrees on Scenario 2. Of course you do. No one’s on such a tight budget that an unexpected change in wealth of $10 changes their utility for theater.
But many people refuse (I’ve checked) to see that Scenario 1 is fully equivalent. They can’t bear to pay another $10 for a show they already paid $10 for. If Scenarios 1 and 2 don’t feel fully equivalent, you’re probably suffering from the sunk cost fallacy!
I love this so much and Bee (my spouse) and I have started talking about it. Our first question is whether you intend to merge your finances. We think you shouldn’t! Because having separate finances means having transferrable utility which puts more powerful and efficient and fair decision/bargaining mechanisms at your disposal.
My next question is why the KS solution vs the Nash solution to the bargaining problem?
But also are you sure the Shapley value doesn’t make more sense here? (There’s a Hart & Mas-Colell paper that looks relevant.) Either way, this may be drastically simplifiable for the 2-player case.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It’s so sweet and nerdy and heart-warming and wonderful! And congratulations!
Upvoted for the delightfully flattering implication for my and Bethany’s relationship. :)
But, yes, a prerequisite is that everyone think like an economist, where everything you care about can be assigned a dollar value.
See also the core assumptions at the top of Bethany’s article [http://messymatters.com/autonomy].
“Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” -- John Kenneth Galbraith
“Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.” -- (unknown)
“They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -- Carl Sagan
Thanks so much, Robert!
And breaking news: I’m now part of the program!
(I’m really excited about this!)
We have a protocol for deciding when to yootle: if the possibility of yootling is so much as mentioned then we must yootle. The only fair way to object to yootling is to dispute that it’s a 50⁄50 decision. If it is a fundamentally joint decision then how would you object? “I want to get my way but not pay anything”? Not so nice. You could say “I don’t want to yootle, I’ll just do it your way”. But that’s equivalent to bidding 0, so might as well go through with the yootling. And after 9 years we do have quite efficient ways to conduct these auctions, with fingers or our phones or out loud.
Holy cow, thank you so much for this. Speaking of WTF reactions, I hope that won’t be how this is perceived. Yours is a perfect example of both the insidiousness and the genius of Beeminder’s exponential pledge schedule.
The fact that there’s no doubt in your mind that you got more value out of Beeminder than the $130some dollars you paid is I hope evidence that it’s more genius than insidiousness. :)
Yours is a textbook case of using Beeminder exactly as intended, to ride the pledge schedule up to the point where the amount of money at risk scares you into never actually paying it. For some people paying even the first $5 is sufficiently aversive. Others go all the way to $810, which has been, almost universally, sufficient to keep people toeing the line. (Ie, only one person has ever actually defaulted with $810 at stake.)
Some people (Katja Grace is an example) prefer to cap the amount at risk and are happy to pay a small fee occasionally. That has the danger of being more expensive in the long term as each particular derailment isn’t a big deal and you can keep delusionally being like “ok, but this time for real!”. Mostly, though, I think it depends on the severity of the akrasia for the specific thing you’re beeminding.
Ooh, not only is procrastination sometimes not akratic, it’s sometimes the opposite! Namely, it can be an effective commitment device. If you want to force yourself to spend less time on a project, just start it closer to its hard deadline.
“This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.” -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague
Isn’t it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people’s commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here’s why we think it could make more sense in our case:
The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You’re starting with a small amount at risk after you’ve already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)
I think we’re fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.
As for where the money is going, well, it’s still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:
http://beeminder.com/meta/atrisk http://beeminder.com/meta/paid
We’d love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?
That’s stupid of us to limit password size—especially after all the “correct horse battery staple” discussion! [ http://xkcd.com/936 ]
But we’re using the Devise module in Rails and definitely not storing in plaintext or anything too idiotic. Definitely need to change whatever stupid Devise default limits password length though. Thanks for pointing it out!
Just as a comment on labels, I used to be an “evangelical atheist” but this essay by Sam Harris changed my mind:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1702,The-Problem-with-Atheism,Sam-Harris
Excerpt:
...I’m not saying that racism is no longer a problem in this country, but anyone who thinks that the problem is as bad as it ever was has simply forgotten, or has never learned, how bad, in fact, it was.
So, we can now ask, how have people of good will and common sense gone about combating racism? There was a civil rights movement, of course. The KKK was gradually battered to the fringes of society. There have been important and, I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race—our major newspapers no longer publish flagrantly racist articles and editorials as they did less than a century ago—but, ask yourself, how many people have had to identify themselves as “non-racists” to participate in this process? Is there a “non-racist alliance” somewhere for me to join?
Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.
I don’t necessarily endorse it but the moral argument would go like so: “I’m definitely not going to pay to read that article so me bypassing the paywall is not hurting the newspaper. The marginal cost is zero. Stealing from a kiosk, on the other hand, deprives the newspaper of a sale (and is just obvious plain old stealing).” In other words, “I’m not stealing a newspaper from the kiosk, I’m just breaking in, photocopying it real quick, and putting it right back. No harm no foul!”
A counterargument might be that you’re contributing to demand for paywall-bypassing which does deprive the newspaper of sales, just less directly.
What really makes people uncomfortable is taking this to its logical conclusion and pointing out that enough economic inefficiency is as much of a human tragedy as, say, driving a school bus full of kids off a cliff. Which I absolutely believe.