You may have heard of this experiment in which participants were able to lose a significant amount of weight using a game theory concept of the credible threat. Participants risked public humiliation by exposing their out-of-shape bodies on a JumboTron. I wonder if this would work on an online community. Finding a trusted third party that is precommitted to posting pictures of participants' bodies in underwear probably isn't very hard, but something tells me the average Less-wronger would not find this type of humiliation a sufficiently motivating negative reinforcement. I have no intentions of participating in such a game – just wanted to share something on an open thread.
The problem with threat is that it sometimes paralyses people ("fight or flight or freeze"). Also, if the consequences of X are unpleasant, it conditions people also to not think about X.
So I would not be surprised to see such motivational systems fail. Humans don't maximize their utility functions. They are composed of subsystems, selected by evolution to more work than fail on average, but some kinds of inputs can still mess them up.
Threatening people if they do something undesired is sometimes just as efficient as kicking your TV set if it doe...
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