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Related: https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ Excerpt: Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower

Related: https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ https://blog.beeminder.com/willpower/ Excerpt: Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower, despite having just defined it. Paraphrasing Laplace, I can explain all behavior simply in terms of responding to incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y’know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call … being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination. Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short-term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well. PS: Also the whole "willpower is like a muscle" theory, known as Ego Depletion, failed to replicate.

sukilot 6y ago
The beeminder theory is undermining by the very concept of money, especially credit cards, which removes the short term cost of losing money. A simpler way to get the same result is to make the future present by surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals.
- dreeves 6y ago
  Ah, I don't agree but that's an interesting point that I could see being true for some people. I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good! I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  Just looked beeminder up. If anyone else doesn't know it's goal tracking and contracts where you pay them if you fail. I'd feel a lot better about that if they were doing something positive with the money, like donating.
  - andreilys 6y ago
    Lookup stickk who donates to an anti charity
    - dreeves 6y ago
      Thanks, yes! Here are all the other commitment device apps we know of: https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
  - maneesh 6y ago
    If they donate to something you approve of, often people will excuse their failures by saying “at least the money is going to a good cause” when I made my bets to places I don’t approve of—-well I would never lose a bet where I had money to the KKK on the line, I’ll tell you that
    - dreeves 6y ago
      Hi Maneesh! I'm actually opposed to anti-charities because I think they're bad for the world and not necessary -- you can get equal motivation with a neutral (non-evil) 3rd party, as long as you make the amount at risk high enough. More at https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
  - deleted 6y ago
blueboo 6y ago
"Willpower" is just another facet of attention. I claim it's easier to do deep work when not in a cluttered, crowded, overly-warm workspace with unasked for music, a dynamic precluded by the purely-incentive based model you're falling back on. You actually /can't/ just weigh the tradeoffs of being disctracted and reach a decision of not being distracted. No -- it's meaningfully and sustainably easier to make good decisions when bad options are removed from the table (sometimes literally.)
- dreeves 6y ago
  Agreed. I wouldn't say any of these astute points argue against commitment devices (as it sounds like you're implying but I could be misreading you). A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.
noncoml 6y ago
> You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Isn't this more like a fight between instinct and rationality? Wanting the pie is rarely a rational decision, while on the other hand wanting to be healthy so you can live longer is absolutely rational. Hence willpower is one's ability to rationally control their own anamalistic instincts and emotions.
- dreeves 6y ago
  Yeah, it's surprisingly controversial but I agree, your long-term self is usually the rational one. Commitment devices are all about forcing/incentivizing your short-term self to do what your long-term self deems best. Sometimes people are too extreme with that, like intentionally living in near poverty their whole life in order to save as much as humanly possible for retirement, or suffering through a PhD program they hate because they think it will eventually be worth it. But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  Wanting to eat things that are delicious because you enjoy the flavor sounds perfectly rational to me. I'll enjoy the anticipation while I'm getting it, I'll enjoy the experience when I'm eating it, and a piece of pie is not going to stop me from being healthy by itself. Sure wanting to eat the whole pie might be irrational, but that's seldom the way people think about it. I can't eat a whole pie at once, but I can definitely eat the bite on my fork, add one more slice to my plate, etc. This mistakes thinking long-term vs thinking marginally, which is the larger point being made.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It's not rational when at the same time the fact that you're overweight with a heart condition and cholesterol problem that could kill you is a flashing through your brain.
    - 6y ago
idclip 6y ago
Doing a mahayasi vipassana helps create a sense for the „thinker“ and other faculties of the mind Though your argument would honestly just move one dimension up since it takes a certain motivation and condition to go and seek that kind of discipline training. The ultimate end of the Buddhist meditations is to let go so you’re right but in the beginning there’s a sort of healthy shedding of dealing with delusions and ideas that create Desirees and ice that do not service which is a bit behind incentive incentive itself becomes being free of those desires, A sort of seeking liberation.
ismail 6y ago
I think the reason thinner later is harder to act to bring about, vs pie now is due to uncertainty. Thinner later is uncertain, hence I think our brains naturally discount the future goal, with a preference for the immediate. what has worked for me is thinking in terms of positive choices, rather than goals or restrictions. It’s not “I am not going to eat that cookie” Rather it’s “I am choosing to lead a healthier life..”
hobofan 6y ago
Though Ego Depletion doesn't seem to be a thing as you pointed out, "willpower is like a muscle" can still hold up if you take the depletion part out of the equation (muscle endurance vs. muscle strength). At least for the underlying neurological mechanisms, there seems to be a connection between connectivity of parts of the prefrontal cortex and the ability to self-regulate, and those parts also appear to be trainable.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  Can you cite some studies which have been replicated successfully and show this effect? I have been looking for them off and on, and have been able to find any which seem robust.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    As for a higher level psychological effect, I'm not aware of any studies (as that is also farther away from my field of study), and I'd also like to know of any. As for the underlying neurobiology, I think [0] is a decent study for identifying the relevant regions involved in procrastination in particular, and [1] is a good review about PFC plasticity. Of course that individually doesn't indicate a higher level effect, but dismissing it altogether in the same breath as ego depletion also doesn't seem right. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33203 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33203 [1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028
luismmolina 6y ago
I use beeminder to do pushups, drink water, cut my hair, wash my clothes, run and do my work. Is not perfect but is the best tool I have found to beat my terrible procrastination. It has changed my life
- dreeves 6y ago
  Holy cow it feels good to hear that! Thank you!
BeetleB 6y ago
If it's not clear to people, dreeves runs (or at least works for) Beeminder. I used it some years ago. You have to figure out how to use it and for what things it will work for you. As an example, for me having any daily task tracked with Beeminder was a huge hassle. I don't want to have to open an app and update several items I'm tracking every day. Others are fine with this. For me, goals with a longer cadence ("once a week") work better on Beeminder. Also, initially you'll not know what you really want to track in Beeminder and what you don't. I did find myself cheating on occasion. If that happens to you, consider whether you should even be tracking this at all via Beeminder. Beeminder can give you a bit of hyperfocus. That task that will cause you to lose money today if you don't do it? Becomes top priority for you that day. I found the items I was Beeminding were getting done, but perhaps other more important items I was not putting into Beeminder weren't. In a sense, after a few months of use, you could say that Beeminder will give you an idea on the importance (or lack of) of the things you are Beeminding. For these reasons, I did stop using it. I'll probably return to it one day when I figure out my priorities. I heartily recommend it to others, though.
- dreeves 6y ago
  Dang, this is extremely valuable feedback and a beautifully balanced review. Thank you! As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever. Oh yeah, and I should point out https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things. Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well! Thanks again for this comment!
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    Yes - the number of integrations is very impressive. I haven't checked, but I doubt any of the competition has this many. In my case, though, these were not automatable. As an example, I would have a Beeminder for decluttering 10 items in the house per day. Nothing can detect I've done it. I still have to somehow enter this daily. On that note, another (dubious?) positive of my using Beeminder briefly: Although I rigorously stuck to the "decluttering 10 items per day", I was not happy with the outcomes. It still seemed a chore. Eventually I realized that this just wasn't a great way to keep my room/house decluttered, and focused on finding other ways - and my house now has much less clutter (without using Beeminder). The "positive" is that Beeminder helped me try an approach that I thought would work. It turned out it didn't, but I would not have realized this without the service. Had I not used Beeminder, I would have not been so religious in decluttering daily, and would blame my lack of discipline as the cause. Beeminder made me disciplined, and I then learned that discipline was not the solution to this particular problem. Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"? For those who don't know, the Beeminder team themselves used it to improve Beeminder - and one of their goals was to have at least one user visible improvement per day. I think when I last checked, the cost of missing that goal was close to a $1000.

sukilot 6y ago

The beeminder theory is undermining by the very concept of money, especially credit cards, which removes the short term cost of losing money. A simpler way to get the same result is to make the future present by surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals.

dreeves 6y ago
Ah, I don't agree but that's an interesting point that I could see being true for some people. I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good! I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!
TACIXAT 6y ago
Just looked beeminder up. If anyone else doesn't know it's goal tracking and contracts where you pay them if you fail. I'd feel a lot better about that if they were doing something positive with the money, like donating.
- andreilys 6y ago
  Lookup stickk who donates to an anti charity
  - dreeves 6y ago
    Thanks, yes! Here are all the other commitment device apps we know of: https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
- maneesh 6y ago
  If they donate to something you approve of, often people will excuse their failures by saying “at least the money is going to a good cause” when I made my bets to places I don’t approve of—-well I would never lose a bet where I had money to the KKK on the line, I’ll tell you that
  - dreeves 6y ago
    Hi Maneesh! I'm actually opposed to anti-charities because I think they're bad for the world and not necessary -- you can get equal motivation with a neutral (non-evil) 3rd party, as long as you make the amount at risk high enough. More at https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
- deleted 6y ago

blueboo 6y ago

"Willpower" is just another facet of attention. I claim it's easier to do deep work when not in a cluttered, crowded, overly-warm workspace with unasked for music, a dynamic precluded by the purely-incentive based model you're falling back on. You actually /can't/ just weigh the tradeoffs of being disctracted and reach a decision of not being distracted. No -- it's meaningfully and sustainably easier to make good decisions when bad options are removed from the table (sometimes literally.)

dreeves 6y ago
Agreed. I wouldn't say any of these astute points argue against commitment devices (as it sounds like you're implying but I could be misreading you). A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.

noncoml 6y ago

> You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Isn't this more like a fight between instinct and rationality? Wanting the pie is rarely a rational decision, while on the other hand wanting to be healthy so you can live longer is absolutely rational. Hence willpower is one's ability to rationally control their own anamalistic instincts and emotions.

dreeves 6y ago
Yeah, it's surprisingly controversial but I agree, your long-term self is usually the rational one. Commitment devices are all about forcing/incentivizing your short-term self to do what your long-term self deems best. Sometimes people are too extreme with that, like intentionally living in near poverty their whole life in order to save as much as humanly possible for retirement, or suffering through a PhD program they hate because they think it will eventually be worth it. But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.
Godel_unicode 6y ago
Wanting to eat things that are delicious because you enjoy the flavor sounds perfectly rational to me. I'll enjoy the anticipation while I'm getting it, I'll enjoy the experience when I'm eating it, and a piece of pie is not going to stop me from being healthy by itself. Sure wanting to eat the whole pie might be irrational, but that's seldom the way people think about it. I can't eat a whole pie at once, but I can definitely eat the bite on my fork, add one more slice to my plate, etc. This mistakes thinking long-term vs thinking marginally, which is the larger point being made.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It's not rational when at the same time the fact that you're overweight with a heart condition and cholesterol problem that could kill you is a flashing through your brain.
  - 6y ago

idclip 6y ago

Doing a mahayasi vipassana helps create a sense for the „thinker“ and other faculties of the mind Though your argument would honestly just move one dimension up since it takes a certain motivation and condition to go and seek that kind of discipline training. The ultimate end of the Buddhist meditations is to let go so you’re right but in the beginning there’s a sort of healthy shedding of dealing with delusions and ideas that create Desirees and ice that do not service which is a bit behind incentive incentive itself becomes being free of those desires, A sort of seeking liberation.

ismail 6y ago

I think the reason thinner later is harder to act to bring about, vs pie now is due to uncertainty. Thinner later is uncertain, hence I think our brains naturally discount the future goal, with a preference for the immediate. what has worked for me is thinking in terms of positive choices, rather than goals or restrictions. It’s not “I am not going to eat that cookie” Rather it’s “I am choosing to lead a healthier life..”

hobofan 6y ago

Though Ego Depletion doesn't seem to be a thing as you pointed out, "willpower is like a muscle" can still hold up if you take the depletion part out of the equation (muscle endurance vs. muscle strength). At least for the underlying neurological mechanisms, there seems to be a connection between connectivity of parts of the prefrontal cortex and the ability to self-regulate, and those parts also appear to be trainable.

Godel_unicode 6y ago
Can you cite some studies which have been replicated successfully and show this effect? I have been looking for them off and on, and have been able to find any which seem robust.
- hobofan 6y ago
  As for a higher level psychological effect, I'm not aware of any studies (as that is also farther away from my field of study), and I'd also like to know of any. As for the underlying neurobiology, I think [0] is a decent study for identifying the relevant regions involved in procrastination in particular, and [1] is a good review about PFC plasticity. Of course that individually doesn't indicate a higher level effect, but dismissing it altogether in the same breath as ego depletion also doesn't seem right. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33203 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33203 [1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.06.028

luismmolina 6y ago

I use beeminder to do pushups, drink water, cut my hair, wash my clothes, run and do my work. Is not perfect but is the best tool I have found to beat my terrible procrastination. It has changed my life

dreeves 6y ago
Holy cow it feels good to hear that! Thank you!

BeetleB 6y ago

If it's not clear to people, dreeves runs (or at least works for) Beeminder. I used it some years ago. You have to figure out how to use it and for what things it will work for you. As an example, for me having any daily task tracked with Beeminder was a huge hassle. I don't want to have to open an app and update several items I'm tracking every day. Others are fine with this. For me, goals with a longer cadence ("once a week") work better on Beeminder. Also, initially you'll not know what you really want to track in Beeminder and what you don't. I did find myself cheating on occasion. If that happens to you, consider whether you should even be tracking this at all via Beeminder. Beeminder can give you a bit of hyperfocus. That task that will cause you to lose money today if you don't do it? Becomes top priority for you that day. I found the items I was Beeminding were getting done, but perhaps other more important items I was not putting into Beeminder weren't. In a sense, after a few months of use, you could say that Beeminder will give you an idea on the importance (or lack of) of the things you are Beeminding. For these reasons, I did stop using it. I'll probably return to it one day when I figure out my priorities. I heartily recommend it to others, though.

dreeves 6y ago
Dang, this is extremely valuable feedback and a beautifully balanced review. Thank you! As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever. Oh yeah, and I should point out https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things. Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well! Thanks again for this comment!
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Yes - the number of integrations is very impressive. I haven't checked, but I doubt any of the competition has this many. In my case, though, these were not automatable. As an example, I would have a Beeminder for decluttering 10 items in the house per day. Nothing can detect I've done it. I still have to somehow enter this daily. On that note, another (dubious?) positive of my using Beeminder briefly: Although I rigorously stuck to the "decluttering 10 items per day", I was not happy with the outcomes. It still seemed a chore. Eventually I realized that this just wasn't a great way to keep my room/house decluttered, and focused on finding other ways - and my house now has much less clutter (without using Beeminder). The "positive" is that Beeminder helped me try an approach that I thought would work. It turned out it didn't, but I would not have realized this without the service. Had I not used Beeminder, I would have not been so religious in decluttering daily, and would blame my lack of discipline as the cause. Beeminder made me disciplined, and I then learned that discipline was not the solution to this particular problem. Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"? For those who don't know, the Beeminder team themselves used it to improve Beeminder - and one of their goals was to have at least one user visible improvement per day. I think when I last checked, the cost of missing that goal was close to a $1000.