I don't know if many of you guys realize, but this whole pledging-money-to-get-motivated business is a very upper-middle-class thing to do. The decision to motivate yourself in this way looks very different depending on whether there still are plenty of ways to spend your money on an assured and tangible improvement to your life. Simply put, one's willingness to engage in this sort of contract signals that you have the money needed to not really feel the loss, and a general lack of awareness of how much it sucks to actually feel the loss. (If you think that you wouldn't mind the possibility of things really sucking as long as the fear of it motivates you to put in some extra effort, there's somebody for whom things actually suck that would really like more money and less pressure. OP may really be happy to switch places with the guy in Fight Club, but I'd bet your ass the guy in Fight Club would also want to switch places with him.)

If you're on the poorer side of the income spectrum, chances are there's some costly stuff that comes higher in your priority list than motivating yourself with money, and usually it's economically rational to go for them instead. Example: until recently I didn't really have a proper desk at which I could write. My desk was really tiny and my desktop computer took up basically all the space on it, so if I wanted to, say, do some exercises from my math workbook I wouldn't have space to spread out all my stuff, and would have to place the exercise book on my knees, or go write on the bed and sit all cramped and frequently have to change position because of back pain (or knee, or elbow). The physical discomfort had a contribution in putting me off studying, and I wasn't too eager in the first place. The proper thing to do with my money back then, if I wanted to improve my likelihood of studying, was not to motivate myself with fear of loss, but to save up for a new damn desk (and a chair that wasn't 12 years old and hard as concrete).

And, of course, it's completely inapplicable to goals related to making or saving money; that would be just like kicking yourself in the foot.

The reason I'm saying this is that this place kind of feels like upper-middle-class people talking to other upper-middle-class people, not realizing that their way of spending money is the upper-middle-class way rather than the universally economically rational way. If it works in your case, then good for you, but there are poorer people in this world, we're here, we exist, and it would be kind of nice to take into consideration the fact that some motivational strategies are not a good idea for everyone. (And if you say they should work all the more so the poorer you are, because then you'll have more to lose -- well, I don't want to say "check your privilege", but... check your privilege.)

BTW, an important question to answer about this system would be "who does the money go to, and why, and are they aware of it?". Because, if there's a common economic agent to which people who do this tend to give their money to -- say, a charity who gets wise of this tendency, or a person who has a lot of friends who do this -- they'd have this really sweet incentive to try and get you to fail.

Some responses seem to be saying that a better tactic would be to train social confidence by performing smaller more manageable actions/ goals rather than aiming for insanely high goals in a very short time span. For example if you create with a graded heirarchy of situations/ actions which induce social anxiety, then you can start by performing the actions that you have rated the lowest, and once you feel comfortable with those actions, work your way up.

This is the approach I've been using so far. For me the method has been working ok, but the main problem I've found with it is that it takes a hell of a lot of time to work through the graded heirarchy to the items towards the top of the list. This is why I'm considering the idea of just starting with the insane goals. If you can do the hardest goals straight of, then it seems that you don't need to waste time with the easier goals. The hardest goals will take a lot more motivation though, and this is where the huge commitment contracts come in.

I'm pretty confident that after doing stuff like that for say, a whole week, I would have enough social confidence for almost all normal purposes, and social confidence would no longer be a problem in my life.

Why do you believe this is true?

Good question. The reading that I've done around this is mostly limited to basic books on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I can't site many specifics, but from what I've read so far the idea that if you force yourself into a situation, and keep yourself in that situation until your anxiety level diminishes by around half, then the next time that you are faced with the situation it will cause you less social anxiety. So far this correlates with my experience for situations that cause low or medium levels of anxiety, but I haven't actually tried it for situations which cause huge amounts of anxiety.

Some comments have recommended seeing a professional. Really, for me this is more of a self improvement project rather than me trying to tackle an anxiety disorder. My social confidence I think is probably if anything above average, but It is still something to have more of. Professional help in a project like this would probably be useful, but my understanding is that professional help is expensive.

have you ever considered that a lack of social confidence is actually just a manifestation of humility and maybe it is a good thing? That's how I look at it, anyway.

I've fixed the formatting. You can do this by copy-pasting the text into the article editor from a plain text editor (that doesn't support formatting) and then adding the necessary formatting (such as headings and italics) in the article editor. Alternatively, you can edit the HTML source by clicking "Edit HTML Source" button in the article editor, and remove all nonstandard formatting tags from there.

Personally, I upvoted this, but I will warn you that you may be getting an abnormal amount of downvotes, not because of the content, but because of the formatting. People around here are extremely picky about non standard formatting. I think that actually your current formatting is just fine and perfectly reasonable, but I am sure that there are some that will get annoyed by it. It's slightly silly, but I do recommend that you change this to the standard formatting if you don't want random downvotes.

Hi, I first found this a while back site after googling something like "how to not procrastinate" and finding one of Eliezer's articles. I've been slowly working may way through the sequences ever since, and i think they are significantly changing my life.

I'm very interested in self improvement/ instrumental rationality type stuff. I've been using this summer to experiment with various projects: learning mediation, learning about different types of therapy to systematically overcome fears, learning about biases and some other stuff.. I'm currently messing around with a productivity/ organisation system whereby I allocate point to myself for good behaviours and deduct points for bad behaviours, and either give myself a reward or pay a penalty as part of a commitment contract depending on how many points I've scored (sometimes my self-improvement ideas get a bit obsessive..)

I've just finished secondary education, which was a mess, and so i'm now quite excited to have more control over my own learning. I've been very interested in rationality since I was young, and have been passionate about philosophy because of this. Though, after getting into this site i've been reading some pretty damaging criticisms of the study of philosophy (at least traditional philosophy and the content that seems to be taught in most universities), and now i'm beginning to question whether i'm really interested in philosophy, and if it is valuable to study, or whether what i'm really after is something more like cognitive science.

This leads me to a problem: I've been offered a place at Oxford University for a course of Philosophy and Psychology and I'm considering trying to change to just study psychology or psychology and linguistics. I'm in the process of familiarizing myself with the basics of all of these fields, and i'm writing letters to my old philosophy teachers with this articlehttp://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html attached to see how well the criticism can be answered. My problem is though that i'm at best a knowledgeable amateur in these subjects, and i'm finding it hard to make a decision about which subjects to study - I don't know what I haven't studied yet so I don't know how important it is for me to know. Any advice on this or generally how to make the decision would be much appreciated, especially if you are familiar with the UK univeristy system, especially if you have studied philosophy. My overall aim for my education is pretty well expressed by parts of less wrong - i want to become more rational, in both my beliefs and my actions (although i find the parts of less wrong about epistemology, self-improvement and anti-akrasia more relevant to this than the parts about AI, maths and physics).

Also, i found solved questions repository, but is there a standard place for problems which people need help solving - as if it exists it may be a better place for parts of this post...? Cheers

Hi,

It looks like I could be a couple of years late, but I could quite do with a mentor.

The things I could do with some help are:

1) I've been offered a place at University in the UK to study philosophy and psychology, but after reading a few fairly damning articles about philosophy, I'm not sure if it's really for me anymore. I'm contemplating something more cognitive sciency.

2) I could do with someone to ask a few basic questions about the less wrong community and how it all works, because i'd quite like to get more involved, but i'm not quite sure how.

3) i'm very interested in self improvement,

Anyone who could help me with any of these things would be great, whether its just to answer a few questions or to become a more long term mentor.

thanks

Make commitment contracts for anything important (works best for long term things). Commitment contracts (beeminder.com stickk.com) have basically solved 90% of motivational problems. The more important something is and the lower the initial expectancy of you actually doing it, the bigger contract you make. for example, if you really need to study for an exam, but you know that in this past you have always intended to study for exams but ended up doing nothing, then put a lot of money on yourself doing it. Be wary if there is ever something important that you do not want to make a commitment contract for, as if you actually expect to do it, then making the contract should pose no problem, as you will be unlikely to lose any money.

Hi,

I first found this a while back site after googling something like "how to not procrastinate" and finding one of Eliezer's articles. I've been slowly working may way through the posts ever since, and i think they are significantly changing my life.

I've just finished secondary education, which i found stultifying, and so i'm now quite excited to have more control over my own learning. I've been very interested in rationality since I was young, and have been passionate about philosophy because of this. Though, after getting into this site i've been exposed to some pretty damaging criticisms of the study of philosophy (at least traditional philosophy and the content that seems to be taught in most universities), and now i'm beginning to question whether i'm really interested in philosophy, and if it is valuable to study, or whether what i'm really after is something more like cognitive science.

This leads me to a problem: I've been offered a place at a well respected university (particularly in philosophy) for a course in which i can choose three out of five of the subjects of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neourobiology and linguistics, and i'm not sure which to choose. I'm in the process of familiarizing myself with the basics of all of these fields, and i'm writing letters to my old philosophy teachers with this article http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html attached to see how well the criticism can be answered. My problem is though that i'm quite uninformed in all of these areas, and i'm finding it hard to make a rational decision about which subjects to study. Any advice on this or generally how to make the decision would be much appreciated (eg. any recommendations for reading). My overall aim for my education is pretty well expressed by parts of less wrong - i want to become more rational, in both my beliefs and my actions (although i find the parts of less wrong about epistemology, self-improvement and anti-akrasia more relevant to this than the parts about AI, maths and physics).

Also, i found solved questions repository, but is there a standard place for problems which people need help solving - as if it exists it may be a better place for most of this post...?

Cheers