I have a bad history of not being responsive to the threat of punishment. When I have an aversive task, and the consequences for not doing that task suddenly get much worse, I start acting like the punishment is inevitable and am even less likely to actually do the task. In other words, I fail the “gun to the head test” quite dramatically.
Guy with a gun: I’m going to shoot you if you haven’t changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I’M GOING TO DIE I’TS NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I’M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just… change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I’M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I’M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN’T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
Also I have a bad history with this kind of thing in general—one thing that I was always bothered by when I was in school and college was that the only motivation I really had for doing my work was to avoid bad consequences—I was so sick of spending my life making myself miserable in order to avoid things that ought to be even worse. I also have a hard time being motivated by money: bad consequences for having insufficient money have the problem I’ve already described, and, well, video games are cheap.
(In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t work, and my parents still support me financially.)
So when I think of commitment apps, I tend to react to them as entirely downside: I don’t expect my behavior to change very much, and I do expect to predictably lose money. :(
The madman theory angle is “If I don’t respond well to threats of negative outcomes, people (including myself) have no reason to threaten me”. The learned helplessness angle is “I’ve never been able to get good sets of tasks and threats, and trying to figure something out usually leads to more punishment, so why put in any effort?”
Combine the two and you get “Tasks with risks of negative outcomes? Ugh, no.”
With learned helplessness, the standard mechanism for (re)learning agency is being guided through a productive sequence by someone who can ensure the negative outcomes don’t happen, getting more and more control over the sequence each time until you can do it on your own, then adapting it to more and more environments.
Avoiding tasks with possible negative outcomes isn’t really feasible, so getting hands-on help with handling threat of negative consequences seems useful. Probably from a mental coach or psychologist.
The app doesn’t help people who struggle with setting reasonable tasks with reasonable rewards and punishments. Akrasia is an umbrella term for “something somewhere in the chain to actually getting to do things is stopping the process”, so it makes sense that one person’s “solution” to akrasia isn’t going to work for a lot of people.
I think it’s healthy to see these kinds of posts as procedural inspiration. As a reader it’s not about finding something that works for you, it’s about analysing the technique someone used to iterate on their first hint of a good idea until it became something that thoroughly helped them.
I think this is a persuasive case that commitment devices aren’t good for you. I’m very interested in how common this is, and if there’s a way you could reframe commit devices to avoid this psychological reaction to them. One idea is to focus on incentive alignment that avoids the far end of the spectrum. With Beeminder in particular, you could set a low pledge cap and then focus on the positive reinforcement of keeping your graph pretty by keeping the datapoints on the right side of the red line.
I know a child who often has this reaction to negative consequences, natural or imposed. I’d welcome discussion on what works well for that mindset. I don’t have any insight, it’s not how my mind works.
It seems like very very small consequences can help a bit. Also trying to address the anxiety with OTC supplements like Magnesium Glycinate and lavender oil.
I’d guess that you have to rely a lot more on persuasion and positive reinforcement—if you want them to do something, it’s probably not going to happen unless they willingly agree to do it.
I wasn’t really like this until I was about 12-13 years old, though; as a younger child I often went into violent rages instead of displaying submissive behavior. I eventually did grow out of hitting peopIe and now only rarely feel genuine anger (as opposed to anger-adjacent feelings such as frustration), but 15-year-old me was still willing to passively resist by laying in a limp ball and enduring the consequences for as long as I needed to!
To whomever overall-downvoted this comment, I do not think that this is a troll.
Being a depressed person, I can totally see this being real. Personally, I would try to start slow with positive reinforcement. If video games are the only thing which you can get yourself to do, start there. Try to do something intellectually interesting in them. Implement a four bit adder in dwarf fortress using cat logic. Play KSP with the Principia mod. Write a mod for a game. Use math or Monte Carlo simulations to figure out the best way to accomplish something in a video game even if it will take ten times longer than just taking a non-optimal route. Some of my proudest intellectual accomplishments are in projects which have zero bearing on the real world.
(Of course, I am one to talk right now. Spending five hours playing Rimworld in a not-terrible-clever way for every hour I work on my thesis.)
I don’t think the original comment was a troll, but I also don’t think it was a helpful contribution on this post. OP specifically framed the post as their own experience, not a universal cure. Comments explaining why it won’t work for a specific person aren’t relevant.
I like comments about other users’ experiences for similar reasons why I like OP. I think maybe the ideal such comment would identify itself more clearly as an experience report, but I’d rather have the report than not.
My depression is currently well-controlled at the moment, and I actually have found various methods to help me get things done, since I don’t respond well to the simplest versions of carrot-and-stick methods. The most pleasant is finding someone else to do it with me (or at least act involved while I do the actual work).
On the other hand, there have been times when procrastinating actually gives me a thrill, like I’m getting away with something. Mediocre video games become much more appealing when I have work to avoid.
I have a bad history of not being responsive to the threat of punishment. When I have an aversive task, and the consequences for not doing that task suddenly get much worse, I start acting like the punishment is inevitable and am even less likely to actually do the task. In other words, I fail the “gun to the head test” quite dramatically.
Guy with a gun: I’m going to shoot you if you haven’t changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I’M GOING TO DIE I’TS NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I’M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just… change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I’M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I’M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN’T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
Also I have a bad history with this kind of thing in general—one thing that I was always bothered by when I was in school and college was that the only motivation I really had for doing my work was to avoid bad consequences—I was so sick of spending my life making myself miserable in order to avoid things that ought to be even worse. I also have a hard time being motivated by money: bad consequences for having insufficient money have the problem I’ve already described, and, well, video games are cheap.
(In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t work, and my parents still support me financially.)
So when I think of commitment apps, I tend to react to them as entirely downside: I don’t expect my behavior to change very much, and I do expect to predictably lose money. :(
That sounds like something a cross between learned helplessness and madman theory.
The madman theory angle is “If I don’t respond well to threats of negative outcomes, people (including myself) have no reason to threaten me”. The learned helplessness angle is “I’ve never been able to get good sets of tasks and threats, and trying to figure something out usually leads to more punishment, so why put in any effort?”
Combine the two and you get “Tasks with risks of negative outcomes? Ugh, no.”
With learned helplessness, the standard mechanism for (re)learning agency is being guided through a productive sequence by someone who can ensure the negative outcomes don’t happen, getting more and more control over the sequence each time until you can do it on your own, then adapting it to more and more environments.
Avoiding tasks with possible negative outcomes isn’t really feasible, so getting hands-on help with handling threat of negative consequences seems useful. Probably from a mental coach or psychologist.
The app doesn’t help people who struggle with setting reasonable tasks with reasonable rewards and punishments. Akrasia is an umbrella term for “something somewhere in the chain to actually getting to do things is stopping the process”, so it makes sense that one person’s “solution” to akrasia isn’t going to work for a lot of people.
I think it’s healthy to see these kinds of posts as procedural inspiration. As a reader it’s not about finding something that works for you, it’s about analysing the technique someone used to iterate on their first hint of a good idea until it became something that thoroughly helped them.
I think this is a persuasive case that commitment devices aren’t good for you. I’m very interested in how common this is, and if there’s a way you could reframe commit devices to avoid this psychological reaction to them. One idea is to focus on incentive alignment that avoids the far end of the spectrum. With Beeminder in particular, you could set a low pledge cap and then focus on the positive reinforcement of keeping your graph pretty by keeping the datapoints on the right side of the red line.
I know a child who often has this reaction to negative consequences, natural or imposed. I’d welcome discussion on what works well for that mindset. I don’t have any insight, it’s not how my mind works.
It seems like very very small consequences can help a bit. Also trying to address the anxiety with OTC supplements like Magnesium Glycinate and lavender oil.
I’d guess that you have to rely a lot more on persuasion and positive reinforcement—if you want them to do something, it’s probably not going to happen unless they willingly agree to do it.
I wasn’t really like this until I was about 12-13 years old, though; as a younger child I often went into violent rages instead of displaying submissive behavior. I eventually did grow out of hitting peopIe and now only rarely feel genuine anger (as opposed to anger-adjacent feelings such as frustration), but 15-year-old me was still willing to passively resist by laying in a limp ball and enduring the consequences for as long as I needed to!
To whomever overall-downvoted this comment, I do not think that this is a troll.
Being a depressed person, I can totally see this being real. Personally, I would try to start slow with positive reinforcement. If video games are the only thing which you can get yourself to do, start there. Try to do something intellectually interesting in them. Implement a four bit adder in dwarf fortress using cat logic. Play KSP with the Principia mod. Write a mod for a game. Use math or Monte Carlo simulations to figure out the best way to accomplish something in a video game even if it will take ten times longer than just taking a non-optimal route. Some of my proudest intellectual accomplishments are in projects which have zero bearing on the real world.
(Of course, I am one to talk right now. Spending five hours playing Rimworld in a not-terrible-clever way for every hour I work on my thesis.)
I don’t think the original comment was a troll, but I also don’t think it was a helpful contribution on this post. OP specifically framed the post as their own experience, not a universal cure. Comments explaining why it won’t work for a specific person aren’t relevant.
I like comments about other users’ experiences for similar reasons why I like OP. I think maybe the ideal such comment would identify itself more clearly as an experience report, but I’d rather have the report than not.
My depression is currently well-controlled at the moment, and I actually have found various methods to help me get things done, since I don’t respond well to the simplest versions of carrot-and-stick methods. The most pleasant is finding someone else to do it with me (or at least act involved while I do the actual work).
On the other hand, there have been times when procrastinating actually gives me a thrill, like I’m getting away with something. Mediocre video games become much more appealing when I have work to avoid.