Ooh, you should check out tagtime on github -- http://tagti.me -- and see if we can join forces on this. I think it's important to have Poisson-distributed sampling because otherwise you can anticipate the next ping and insert a bias into the tracking (even if you're trying to be perfectly honest -- in fact, you might try too hard and overcompensate, inserting the opposite bias). If the pings are Poisson then that's impossible.

Thanks for the plug for Beeminder and TagTime! They are indeed by exactly the same people, me and Bethany Soule.

In case anyone missed our big pre-launch thing here on LessWrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z1/antiakrasia_tool_like_stickkcom_for_data_nerds/

And, yes, TagTime+Beeminder is an amazing combination, IMHO. We'd love to get a friendlier version of TagTime out the door. There is an Android app that Bethany wrote that's friendlier than the desktop version, but I think there's a lot less value for it on a phone than on your main work computer.

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.]

I really like parts of this, but other parts -- like "focus on doing what you love" and "increase your expectancy of success" -- strike me as banal or vacuous. Note that I have a very biased view of this stuff, as will be clear from my recent anti-akrasia post on LessWrong: Anti-akrasia tool: like stickK.com for data nerds

So it won't be surprising that the part of this I really love, and what I think is the part that really matters, is commitment devices and setting goals that are measurable, realistic, and time-anchored (so-called SMART goals).

Btw, I would say that StickK does commitment devices better than Beeminder but everything else about goal setting and goal tracking (per the SMART criteria [2]) worse. And more and more I feel that getting the commitment contracts perfect doesn't matter. If you're the type to cheat and weasel then self-binding websites will have no appeal to you in the first place, since, as a cheating weasel, you're unbindable!

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

Instance: Letting my inbox forever grow so that important items get lost in a sea.

Attempted Solutions: A ton of hacks like email snooze features and GTD-like systems. But fundamentally it's a problem of just avoiding items that are sitting on your to-do list.

Actual Solution: Beeminding my inbox!

Wait, we may not be on the same page here. There's nothing you can do to one person, economically or otherwise, that would be nearly as bad as a school bus full of kids driving off a cliff, right?

Do you think this mitigates the problem at all: http://blog.beeminder.com/blogdog

In short, we (the founders) are reciprocating with our own commitment contracts, pledging $1395 to Beeminder users to force ourselves to stay on our own yellow brick roads. Maybe it's more in the category of a nice little gesture that most users won't even know about. It certainly doesn't address fundamentally the issue you raised. (Of course, that wasn't the point of it -- we just really needed to raise the stakes on our own commitment contracts since paying ourselves wasn't cutting it!)

(PS: Not bikeshedding by any means! You can't imagine how helpful all this has been. Especially the further consultation we've been having with pjeby offline, but this whole comment thread as well.)

True, I was just thinking that something that correlates (loosely) with "having made awesome stuff happen" might be better than something that correlates with "has one of multiple skills that contribute to the hypothetical ability to make awesome stuff happen".

As for whether "making awesome stuff happen" is the right underlying metric... what else?

I took the survey and I agree with some other comments about the difficulty of assigning probabilities to distant events. I decided to just round to either 0 or 1% for a few things. I hope "0" won't be interpreted as literally zero.

Something bugs me about the IQ question. It's easy to call sour grapes on those complaining about that metric but it seems like such a poor proxy for what matters, namely, making awesome stuff happen. Not denying a correlation, just that I think we can do much better. Even income in dollars might be a better proxy despite the obvious problems with that.

That's a good point and a valuable datapoint. :) It seems like a funny thing for a rationalist to care about though... (Not the donating to charity part, of course, just that it seems orthogonal -- you should should donate to charity independently of your use of commitment devices.)

I do see what you mean though. The use of self-binding is an admission of a fundamental irrationality (akrasia) so it may be valuable to have some plausible deniability.

Side note: You probably typed a "3." instead of a "1." and the markdown editor thing "fixed" it for you. That's a big pet peeve of mine about markdown, which I otherwise love. Blatant violation of the anti-magic principle.