aelephant comments on Rationalist households: What can London learn from its predecessors? - Less Wrong

7 Post author: KnaveOfAllTrades 23 August 2013 07:56AM

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Comment author: aelephant 23 August 2013 01:32:07PM 3 points [-]

I wonder if getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder could help with the cleanliness. When I lived in a group house I found that my mate whom I shared a bathroom with had a significantly lower dirtiness threshold than I did. I don't consider myself particularly disgusting & never even noticed the bathroom was getting dirty, but it drove him crazy. I didn't want to be a dick & never clean the bathroom, but I never cleaned the bathroom because he ended up flipping out & doing it himself. I probably would've agreed to using Beeminder or some other similar system to help motivate me, had I known about these kinds of things at the time.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 23 August 2013 01:47:03PM 7 points [-]

"Getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder" strikes me as pretty tough to negotiate, though probably less tough to negotiate in a LW-cluster household. There are lots of potential failure modes for division of cleanliness labour, and commitment strategies address only a subset of those. The beauty of outsourcing it to a third party is that it bypasses them all.