I have an exercise app that feeds me lotus if I work out every day. (In the form of streaks, achievements, and eventually unlocking more exercises.) I want not to work out every day.
Can you set it up so the lotus is conditional on you not having lied? For example, the app could praise you for not lying, so your guilt would outweigh the feeling of achievement if you lie. It could say that the app only keeps track of an approximation to the true, platonic streaks and achievements, which is only as accurate as the information you give it, and if you lie it becomes much harder for you to figure out whether you receive lotus.
Perhaps it could just ask you questions of the form “Have you lied in this time period?” and do as much with that information as won’t make you lie about that. For example, there might be a “What if?” tool which lets you select a subset of your statements, and shows you what your progress had been if those were all you stated.
I feel like you missed what I was getting at. (Either that, or I missed what you’re getting at.) Context is noticing the taste of lotus.
It kind of sounds like you think that I’m lying because I lack willpower, or something along those lines. But that’s not it. The point of lying is to decouple the lotus from whether I’m actually exercising, so that I exercise when I choose to, not when the app thinks I should. (I think I should probably exercise more than I currently choose to, but less than the app thinks I should.)
With that in mind, I’m not really sure why “only get lotus when I tell the truth” is something I would want.
That said, it would be kind of nice if I could tag my lies and have the app show me only truthful workouts. As it is I can’t tell how often I’m actually exercising. (It occurs to me I can get some of that benefit by creating a custom workout named “fake”.)
Actually that sounds like a good idea not just because you’d get more accurate information about how often you exercise, but also for the following reason: what often happens (at least to me) when I’m tracking something I want to do is that when I have to put in a failed instance I feel guilty. Due to Goodhart’s Imperius this then disincetivizes me to track the behavior in the first place (esp if I’m failing often) because I get negative feedback from the tracking, so the simplest solution from the monkey brain’s perspective is to stop the tracking. But if you get the lotus whether you did the thing or not, conditional on you entering that information into the app, then that gives the proper incentive to track. So I would predict this would work well.
I have an exercise app that feeds me lotus if I work out every day. (In the form of streaks, achievements, and eventually unlocking more exercises.) I want not to work out every day.
I’m solving this dilemma by lying to the app.
Can you set it up so the lotus is conditional on you not having lied? For example, the app could praise you for not lying, so your guilt would outweigh the feeling of achievement if you lie. It could say that the app only keeps track of an approximation to the true, platonic streaks and achievements, which is only as accurate as the information you give it, and if you lie it becomes much harder for you to figure out whether you receive lotus.
Perhaps it could just ask you questions of the form “Have you lied in this time period?” and do as much with that information as won’t make you lie about that. For example, there might be a “What if?” tool which lets you select a subset of your statements, and shows you what your progress had been if those were all you stated.
I feel like you missed what I was getting at. (Either that, or I missed what you’re getting at.) Context is noticing the taste of lotus.
It kind of sounds like you think that I’m lying because I lack willpower, or something along those lines. But that’s not it. The point of lying is to decouple the lotus from whether I’m actually exercising, so that I exercise when I choose to, not when the app thinks I should. (I think I should probably exercise more than I currently choose to, but less than the app thinks I should.)
With that in mind, I’m not really sure why “only get lotus when I tell the truth” is something I would want.
That said, it would be kind of nice if I could tag my lies and have the app show me only truthful workouts. As it is I can’t tell how often I’m actually exercising. (It occurs to me I can get some of that benefit by creating a custom workout named “fake”.)
So you don’t like the gamification on the app. Have you considered… using a less gamified app to track workouts? Or not using an app at all?
I have. I like having the app better than not having an app. It’s likely that a better app exists, but finding it is higher activation energy.
Actually that sounds like a good idea not just because you’d get more accurate information about how often you exercise, but also for the following reason: what often happens (at least to me) when I’m tracking something I want to do is that when I have to put in a failed instance I feel guilty. Due to Goodhart’s Imperius this then disincetivizes me to track the behavior in the first place (esp if I’m failing often) because I get negative feedback from the tracking, so the simplest solution from the monkey brain’s perspective is to stop the tracking. But if you get the lotus whether you did the thing or not, conditional on you entering that information into the app, then that gives the proper incentive to track. So I would predict this would work well.