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byrnema comments on Applied Picoeconomics - Less Wrong
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Comments (76)
You probably meant to write "alcohol" here.
All data, even anecdotal, on how to beat akrasia is great, and this sounds like a method that might work well in many cases. If you wanted to raise your odds of succeeding even more you could probably make your oath in front of a group of friends or family members, or even include a rule about donating your money or time if you failed, preferably to a cause you hated for bonus motivation.
I'd like to give a public oath myself, but I'm going away shortly and will be busy with various things, so I don't know how much time I will have for self-improvement. In somewhat of a coincidence, I just received "Breakdown of Will" in the mail yesterday. How about this.. I proudly and publicly swear to read the entire book "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie and write an interesting post on LW based on the book before July 17th 2009, so help me Bayes.
If it was a typo, it was a fortuitous one! I've quoted it several times in conversation while explaining that I read 'somewhere' that the key to quitting is in identifying the single, local instance (a beer) with the global bad (alcoholism) even if the connection isn't technically true. Because otherwise, without thinking about it this way, avoiding that single drink may seem silly or irrational, and that is what usually defeats me. (Not giving the small steps enough credit in whatever I'm trying to achieve.)