Comment on Group rationality diary, 12/10/12

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:46:57 GMT

If you do an experiment, please do report back. I'm interested in the results, though not enough to do it myself.

Mostly I regard very high-pressure pledges as a kind of personal "nuclear option". I occasionally will do this for a short period - like last semester, when I had to catch up on schoolwork after a very long illness, and needed very strict rules to keep myself on track - but it seems like a bad idea to do if you think the probability of breaking it is at all high. If you do break it, you lose a big part of your ability to trust important precommitments; I don't use such promises all the time because I want to be able to use them if I have to.

Also, I don't really want to lose that much money.

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