Open Thread, May 16-31, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

Question about anti-akrasia measures and precommitments to yourself.

Suppose you need to do action X to achieve the most utility, but it's somewhat unpleasant. To incentivize yourself, you precommit to give yourself reward Y if and only if you do action X. You then complete action X. But now reward Y has become somewhat inconvenient to obtain.

Should you make the effort to obtain reward Y, in order to make sure your precommitments are still credible?

Can you provide some specific examples?

0beoShaffer14y

It depends on the difficulty of obtaining Y relative to its pleasantness, but in general I would say yes. Specifically, good anti-akrasia measures are valuable enough that you should be willing to go through quite a bit of effort to persevere them. Thus if the effect of obtaining Y in these circumstances is to persevere your precommitmint ability and than it is worth going expending a large amount of effort on Y. But, you should also keep in mind the possibility that you will develop a negative association between fulling your precomintmints and then having to go through a large amount of effort for a reward that isn't worth it. Is their some "guilty pleasure" or other suitable reward that you could substitute for Y, that would be keeping in the spirt of the bargain you made with yourself?

7Shmi14y

Is there an equivalent reward that is easier to obtain?