Commitment contracts
I have been using commitment contracts (eg. Via Stickk and Beeminder) for a while now with quite a high degree of success. The basic idea is that you precommit to reward or punish yourself for anything that you know you should do. Example: You want to lose weight. You define a certain amount of weight that you want to lose over a certain time period (like a pound a week). If you fail to do this, you lose a certain amount of money - pay it to a charity, pay it to a commitment contract company etc.. If you do lose the weight, you gain a predefined reward - eg. You buy yourself a nice hat or something. Fairly simple.
Howfar should/ can commitment contracts be taken?
It seems that for everything that anyone wants to do, but lacks the motivation, there is always something that would motivate you to do it. Everything has a price right? And by making use of commitment contracts you can force yourself to choose between paying a huge price (financial or otherwise) or doing whatever you know you should do but don't really want to do, you can ultimately make yourself do that thing that you don't want to do. Whatever it is. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but it seems like from that perspective, akrasia is a pretty solved problem?
Personal Example
My situation is this. I could do with a little bit more social confidence. I don't think I'm underconfident really, but more confidence would be good, which I think is probably the same for most people. So I figured, it would probably be a lot better to solve this problem soon. The sooner the better.
I also figured there is a process I could go through to make this happen. Lets say I make a list of all the things that cause me the most social anxiety, and also that wouldn't be too damaging for my social life afterwards (for example, starting fights with random strangers or walking round my local city naked would be pretty high on the list, but I don't want to be arrested or be known as "that crazy streaker" for the rest of my life. Of the top of my head, some ideas would be: going to a city far away from my home and walking up to people and pretending to be crazy (knocking on people's doors and asking "have you seen my pet fish?" until I get the door shut in my face), going to clubs and sitting in the middle of the dance floor, or anything else which would be very socially painful to do.
Contract
So I could set up a commitment contract stating I must do each of these activities until my anxiety has decreased to half of its initial level by the end of a certain date. If I don't do this then I pay x pound to y person. 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.
Of course, these things make me feel a little bit nervous just when I think of myself doing them, so I'd need a hell of a lot of motivation to do them. I'd say a commitment contract worth a couple of thousand pounds would do the trick. But of course, I don't want to lose the contract. If I do, it would be a disaster, I would end up with a huge financial loss, and no increase in social confidence. It seems to me then, that to increase the expectancy of success, I should just increase the amount of money that I place on the bet. Lets say £10,000. I'd say for that amount of money, I'd almost certainly go through with the project. Still if I complete it, it would be an almost unbearable loss, but because of this, I reckon that my chances of success are high enough to mean that if I do the expected utility calculations of probability of failure vs. success and value of gains vs. losses, it is probably a good bet to make.
Also, to make sure I don't have the option of backing out and cancelling the contract, I could just set up some sort of legal contract, and have someone else be the referee for whether I have succeeded with the project.
Problem
When thinking about this, I got quite anxious just by thinking about making myself do this. I realised, that this state of anxiety would not be fun, and that having the threat of a huge loss like will probably make you pretty miserable in the long-term. This is why I don't think this would be a great idea for something like losing weight. It is a long term goal, and during that time you'd probably be constantly scared shitless of losing all your money (you might end up losing the weight from stress). So overall, it seems that this form of merciless commitment contract would be best for the short term projects - like a week long - which would minimise the amount of stress/ anxiety of being faced with two extremely painful options in the short term (losing a shit load of money or doing something incredibly painful). As I was experiencing a bit of anxiety by thinking about all of this, I also figured that the best option would be to spend as little time thinking about making the contract as possible, and just make the contract, because dithering over it also causes stress/ anxiety.
At this point I got really stressed and anxious because I realised that what seemed to me to be the most rational option was to make a huge commitment contract right then in the moment to do activities that would cause me a great deal of social anxiety over the next week. At this point I got too stressed, and realised that I couldn't motivate myself to make myself make the contract and decided not to think about any of this stuff for a while because I'd managed to immerse myself into a state of sweaty paralysis at the thought of making commitment contracts. I wish I could say that I didn't do that, and that I actually made these contracts, and came out after a very stressful week feeling socially invincible. But I didn't.
Fictional Example
Then I realised that if I wish that I did do that, then I still think I have made the wrong choice. In the film Fight Club there is a scene where Tyler Durden goes to an off licence late at night, pulls the shopkeeper out into the car park, and puts a gun to his head. He then asks the poor guy what did you used to want to be when you grew up. The guy says a vet and he didn't do it because it was too hard. Tyler takes his wallet, with information about his address etc. and says that if the guy isn't on the way to becoming a vet in 6 weeks, he will kill him. (I think this is what happened, I haven't seen the film in a year or two). So in a way, I'm kind of envious of that shopkeeper.
I'm not actually too sure about what Existentialism is, but it seems like this is a bit of an existential crisis.
Note
You may think that a) doing these things wouldn't actually improve social confidence enough b) that as the loss is too high, even a small risk wouldn't be worth it c) that the stress you put yourself under wouldn't make it worth it d) some other objection. You may be right… My point is, that for most people, if they think about it, there is some sort of commitment contract like this which would be worth them making.
So… erm… Any thoughts?
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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.
Sorry I don't quite understand what you mean by "check your privilege" and how that constitutes a counter argument to the idea that commitment contracts should work all the more so if you are poorer. Could you explain?
I don't quite understand what you means here. I've always thought that commitment contracts work for me because I'm generally aware that losing money sucks, and when I lose money I can't spend it on other things.
I agree that in some situations where you have very little money financial commitment contracts may not be the best idea. What do you think about commitment contracts that are based on social incentives rather than financial ones? or any other kind of commitment contract that isn't based around money? eg. http://aherk.com/