Comment author: shminux 22 January 2014 01:49:54AM *  11 points [-]

We care about making sure that he comes to the Buffy sing-along if and only if my value for his company exceeds his value for staying home.

I bet this would be a big sticking point for many couples, "What do you mean you'd rather stay home than come with me? We are a couple! You would pay me how much to leave you alone?! What am I, a whore? Worse than a whore, even, you would pay me as much JUST TO LEAVE YOU ALONE!" (Door slam)

One has to have a very special relationship to not feel either rejected or coerced in situations like that.

Comment author: dreeves 22 January 2014 07:23:20AM 9 points [-]

Upvoted for the delightfully flattering implication for my and Bethany's relationship. :)

But, yes, a prerequisite is that everyone think like an economist, where everything you care about can be assigned a dollar value.

See also the core assumptions at the top of Bethany's article [http://messymatters.com/autonomy].

Comment author: pianoforte611 21 January 2014 10:12:26PM 4 points [-]

This sounds efficient and a good way to get around the bad feelings that can often build up when people live together and disagree during decision making.

I imagine if I were to implement this there might still be disagreement in deciding when to use yootling for making a decision (Please no meta-humor on this). Using it for every decision sounds annoying.

Are you concerned that the next people who you live with may be less receptive to this method of decision making? Using this system could cause you to miss out on learning the subtle social skill of coming to a group consensus.

Comment author: dreeves 22 January 2014 07:18:13AM 6 points [-]

We have a protocol for deciding when to yootle: if the possibility of yootling is so much as mentioned then we must yootle. The only fair way to object to yootling is to dispute that it's a 50/50 decision. If it is a fundamentally joint decision then how would you object? "I want to get my way but not pay anything"? Not so nice. You could say "I don't want to yootle, I'll just do it your way". But that's equivalent to bidding 0, so might as well go through with the yootling. And after 9 years we do have quite efficient ways to conduct these auctions, with fingers or our phones or out loud.

Comment author: badger 22 January 2014 02:16:18AM 9 points [-]

Hmm, if Dan or Bethany happen to be reading this, why split the surplus proportional to the bids when making a joint purchase rather than split it equally? An equal split seems fairer at first glance, and that mechanism definitely hits the Myerson-Satterthewaite bound in equilibrium if both people act non-cooperatively. The proportional split mechanism is messy enough I can't see the equilibrium immediately, so I'm curious if there is some advantage to it I'm not seeing.

Comment author: dreeves 22 January 2014 06:56:15AM 4 points [-]

Great question, and upon reflection (I actually looked this up in my PhD dissertation just now!) I agree. I actually can't remember the last time Bethany and I used a joint purchase auction. For some reason it never comes up -- we just each buy things and don't worry about joint ownership. If we did disagree about whether to buy a household item we'd probably just straight up yootle for whether to buy it (with the cost split 50/50 if we did).

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 16 December 2013 11:15:16PM *  14 points [-]

I started using beeminder more actively, and successfully trained myself to execute a daily goal that's very important to me. The price was paying beeminder $10, $30 and finally $90 for defaulting on the goal. That last payment seemed to trigger some sort of WTF reaction in my mind that has pushed me to strict compliance and kept me far away from default ever since. I value the successful execution of the goal far above the money I paid.

Comment author: dreeves 17 December 2013 07:15:02AM 5 points [-]

Holy cow, thank you so much for this. Speaking of WTF reactions, I hope that won't be how this is perceived. Yours is a perfect example of both the insidiousness and the genius of Beeminder's exponential pledge schedule.

The fact that there's no doubt in your mind that you got more value out of Beeminder than the $130some dollars you paid is I hope evidence that it's more genius than insidiousness. :)

Yours is a textbook case of using Beeminder exactly as intended, to ride the pledge schedule up to the point where the amount of money at risk scares you into never actually paying it. For some people paying even the first $5 is sufficiently aversive. Others go all the way to $810, which has been, almost universally, sufficient to keep people toeing the line. (Ie, only one person has ever actually defaulted with $810 at stake.)

Some people (Katja Grace is an example) prefer to cap the amount at risk and are happy to pay a small fee occasionally. That has the danger of being more expensive in the long term as each particular derailment isn't a big deal and you can keep delusionally being like "ok, but this time for real!". Mostly, though, I think it depends on the severity of the akrasia for the specific thing you're beeminding.

Comment author: jetm 03 October 2013 04:14:39AM 5 points [-]

If I understand it correctly, much of the power in Beeminder comes from the threat of losing money when you fail. How many times did you fail at writing before giving up? I have not used BM in a while, but I did successfully use it for writing.

(Number of consecutive push-ups doesn't seem like a good thing to Beemind. If your body doesn't have 50 push-ups in it, wanting it really bad isn't going to help much. Tracking number of push-ups done in a given amount of time would probably work better, which would naturally increase consecutive pushups.)

Comment author: dreeves 08 October 2013 11:21:35PM 1 point [-]

I very much agree with the parenthetical about pushups. I beemind 30 pushups per day -- http://beeminder.com/d/push -- with the idea that I'll gradually ramp that up as my max reps increases. Except I'm failing to ever do that and have been at 30/day forever. If I cared more I'd ramp it up though. Right now I'm just happy to be forced to maintain some semblance of baseline upper-body strength.

The general point: beemind inputs, not outputs. Ie, things you have total control over.

PS: The Beeminder android app has a pushup counter built in, where you put your phone on the floor and touch your nose to it on each pushup and it tallies them for you.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 03 October 2013 03:16:25AM 2 points [-]

I think quantifying goal accomplishment is generally not trivial, unless you are using the pomodoro technique. I think I've read a couple quite positive reports of beeminding pomodoros.

Comment author: dreeves 03 October 2013 06:31:11AM 1 point [-]

Pomodoros is a great metric. Katja Grace makes the case for that here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/08/on-the-goodness-of-beeminder.html (she just calls them blocks of time).

I think raw number of hours is a fine metric too though. Discretizing into pomodoros has both advantages and disadvantages.

If you can quantify actual output, that might be ideal. Like how we track User-Visible Improvements to Beeminder. You might expect that to be too fuzzy a metric but we found a criterion that's been rock solid for years now: If we're willing to publicly tweet it then it counts. Pride prevents us from ever getting too weaselly about it.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 August 2013 06:04:41PM 5 points [-]

I can see this working better than a dysfunctional household, but if you're both in the habit of just doing things, this is going to make everything worse.

Comment author: dreeves 23 September 2013 01:37:26AM 1 point [-]

Very fair point! Just like with Beeminder, if you're lucky enough to simply not suffer from akrasia then all the craziness with commitment devices is entirely superfluous. I liken it to literal myopia. If you don't have the problem then more power to you. If you do then apply the requisite technology to fix it (glasses, commitment devices, decision auctions).

But actually I think decision auctions are different. There's no such thing as not having the problem they solve. Preferences will conflict sometimes. Just that normal people have perfectly adequate approximations (turn taking, feeling each other out, informal mental point systems, barter) to what we've formalized and nerded up with our decision auctions.

Comment author: D_Malik 11 May 2013 11:42:14AM 7 points [-]

A well-known trick for memorizing things verbatim is to make them rhyme and put them in a song. Most people reading this know the alphabet song, for instance, and you can use this to learn US states and capitals or chemical elements.

Maybe it would be possible to do this without the rhyming, by using text-to-speech software to convert the information into audio and then playing that over vocals-free music. Instead of text-to-speech software, you could buy/get an audiobook with the information, if one exists. It might be possible to use this, for instance, to memorize multiplication tables up to 100 easily. I haven't yet tried any of this.

I also intend to research whether hearing something repetitively while sleeping helps you to memorize it verbatim, and whether that would harm sleep.

Relatedly, I noticed recently that I knew the words in a 14-minute ASMR video almost verbatim because I had listened to it so often. So one idea is to pay someone skilled at producing ASMR to read you things you want to memorize.

Comment author: dreeves 20 May 2013 06:21:40PM 0 points [-]

See also the digit-sound method: http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/01/06/how-to-remember-numbers/

(I have the vague intention to create a handy tool based on that, which I'd call digimaphone: http://digimaphone.com )

Comment author: ialdabaoth 16 May 2013 06:14:04AM 8 points [-]

Actually, most people will identify with a scientist's last name more than a first name - so pick a scientist's last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.

I'll be Maxwell Tesla.

Comment author: dreeves 20 May 2013 04:43:36PM 1 point [-]

Too funny; those are the middle names of my kids! :)

Comment author: dreeves 20 May 2013 03:40:55PM 2 points [-]

I wrote an article with a smilar conclusion: http://messymatters.com/savings

It includes this caricature of traditional financial advice: "You want to stop working when you’re 60ish, right? And you don’t want to be dirt poor at that point, right? So here’s what you do: live as if you’re dirt poor from now till you’re 60. Problem solved."

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