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pjeby comments on Breaking the chain of akrasia - Less Wrong Discussion
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Viliam, thanks so much! What's surprising to me is that you're getting that much motivational power out of Beeminder even without pledging money to stay on your yellow brick roads. Theoretically, that's where the real motivational power comes from -- setting up a commitment device.
If you agree that hyperbolic discounting is at the heart of akrasia then you should, I believe, agree that commitment devices are fundamental to the solution. But tracking and visualizing your progress on a graph of course goes a long way by itself.
As I've argued on LessWrong before it's the combination of data visualization and commitment devices that's going to make Beeminder take over the world. I figure by solving akrasia we can easily double world GDP, for example, right? :)
[Disclosure, if it wasn't obvious: I'm part of Beeminder. Viliam's gushing, on the other hand, is thoroughly untainted -- we don't know him(?) in real life even.]
Well, you'll eventually have some suggestive data one way or the other; my guess, though, is that there won't be a strong correlation between precommitment amounts and success.
Rather, I expect you'll mostly see people who 1) keep running off roads or giving up, or 2) who succeed after a small number of failures. People who crank up to a midrange and then stay on their road(s) forever after seem unlikely to me. (This is why I think private branding or flat-fee approaches are your best bet for stable and sustainable funding in the long term.)
I could be wrong, of course. An awful lot depends on what population you end up being a cross-section of.
That's not going to happen, trust me. ;-) There is no silver bullet for that (i.e., no universal solution that doesn't require extensive individual customization), and I've worked with plenty of people for whom Beeminder would be a curse rather than a blessing.
Part of the point is that humans are not homo economicus: not all values are fungible, and some values are in conflict within a given individual.