Viliam, thanks so much! What's surprising to me is that you're getting that much motivational power out of Beeminder even without pledging money to stay on your yellow brick roads. Theoretically, that's where the real motivational power comes from -- setting up a commitment device.
If you agree that hyperbolic discounting is at the heart of akrasia then you should, I believe, agree that commitment devices are fundamental to the solution. But tracking and visualizing your progress on a graph of course goes a long way by itself.
As I've argued on LessWrong before it's the combination of data visualization and commitment devices that's going to make Beeminder take over the world. I figure by solving akrasia we can easily double world GDP, for example, right? :)
[Disclosure, if it wasn't obvious: I'm part of Beeminder. Viliam's gushing, on the other hand, is thoroughly untainted -- we don't know him(?) in real life even.]
What's surprising to me is that you're getting that much motivational power out of Beeminder even without pledging money to stay on your yellow brick roads. Theoretically, that's where the real motivational power comes from -- setting up a commitment device.
Well, you'll eventually have some suggestive data one way or the other; my guess, though, is that there won't be a strong correlation between precommitment amounts and success.
Rather, I expect you'll mostly see people who 1) keep running off roads or giving up, or 2) who succeed after a small number ...
I'd like to share my specific motivation for writing Can the Chain Still Hold You?
I agree with Yvain that akrasia is probably a major reason that rationality alone doesn't create superheroes. You might be much better than average at making good decisions based on an accurate model of reality, but that doesn't mean you can follow through with them.
Many people report that their thinking is clearer and better as a result of Less Wrong. But despite our many, many attempts to hack away at the problem of akrasia (more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), I haven't heard of many LWers conquering akrasia.
But I still have hope that this is possible. In 2006, we finally got a decent psychological theory of procrastination, much better than the old decisional-avoidant-arousal theory. On the timescale of progress in psychology, 2006 is basically yesterday. The first book on how to apply this new theory to daily life was published in late 2010. There is no community of people systematically practicing these techniques and reporting their results.
So it seems to me there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to be scooped up in the field of procrastination research. If we try and test enough things, and especially if our tests our theory-guided, we may be able to learn new things and flip a few causal factors such that the chain of akrasia no longer holds us — at least, not as tightly as before.