dreeves comments on How a pathological procrastinor can lose weight [Anti-akrasia] - Less Wrong

24 Post author: dreeves 18 April 2009 08:05PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 18 April 2009 09:18:07PM 6 points [-]

How do you know that people won't lie about their weight in order to win bets? How do we know that you'll pay people who win their bets?

Comment author: dreeves 18 April 2009 11:37:38PM 2 points [-]

Great questions. It's just honor system for now. That's not necessarily crazy though. I mean, why do people on ebay actually send the goods after they get paid?

Comment author: Alicorn 19 April 2009 02:06:05AM *  4 points [-]

People on eBay who don't send the goods get negative feedback, which influences their ability to make future deals. Even that doesn't always stop thieves; a family friend once bought an iPod on eBay and was sent a padded envelope full of crumpled newspaper. (Then he went on court TV to get his money back from the scammer, but that is another story.)

Comment author: dreeves 19 April 2009 03:15:59AM 0 points [-]

Good point, though ebay still succeeds in the sense of providing a valuable service despite the fraud. Kibotzer should probably always remain community oriented -- perhaps an existing user has to recruit you and vouch for you (and for Kibotzer) before the bet starts.

Right now I'm just focused on the value of a service like this, assuming away the trust/fraud issues. I'm confident those are ultimately solvable. People are mostly pretty decent, in my experience.

By the way, thanks everyone for all the feedback! The comments would also be a great place for pointers to other anti-akrasia tools. I mentioned stickk.com already. Are there others? Anti-akrasia can be interpreted more broadly than "create new carrots and sticks".

Comment author: Lawliet 18 April 2009 11:50:47PM 0 points [-]

I would upvote this because it's important that you answered the question and I don't want to discourage that, but I don't want to imply that I like your honor system solution.