I’m going to have to read this a few more times before I understand it fully, but I want to address one thing right away:
For example, how many Republican senators and Baptist ministers would you guess have sworn mighty oaths to never have gay sex...what you have done sets up an expectation that a single failure will lead to the destruction of someone’s entire life… and that is NOT a responsible thing to suggest or prime, EVER.
The way I dealt with this was to make my oaths in one month blocks. So the Republican would have to swear “I won’t have any gay sex...this month.” Even for the most lustful, this should be possible.
If, at the end of the month, this was so painful he wants to just give up on this, he can. Or if he thinks he can do it, he could also include the statement in his next month’s oath.
What I found was that there’s a very different mental feeling between “I can never do this again” and “I have to wait a month to do this.” The latter is annoying but bearable, and it’s why I included the “never make an open-ended oath” point up there.
(if you want to test this for yourself, but don’t have any repressed homosexual urges, masturbation makes a good test case)
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers. I think it’s better for something like dieting. Tell yourself you won’t eat cookies the whole month, do it in the full knowledge that you’ll start eating cookies again when the oath runs out, pig out on cookies for one day, and then when you have no desire whatsoever for any more cookies, swear to diet again for the next month.
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers.
I’m saying that your “dooming myself to a life of laziness forever” is an artificially created disaster, where none would have existed otherwise. The closeted gay thing was just giving an example of how (as I said), “For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous.”
IOW, using your “doom” model, if a person swears not to eat cookies for a month, and then fails to do so, they will now consider themselves doomed forever. That’s the kind of failure mode I’m talking about.
Hi from the future [1]! Beeminder has a version of this built in: the one-week akrasia horizon. You can change anything about a Beeminder goal, including ending it, at any time, but the change doesn’t take effect for a week. As Katja Grace once said on Overcoming Bias: “[you] can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).”
[1] I’m mildly terrified that it’s against the norms to reply to something this old. I’ve been thinking hard about your (Scott’s) recent ACX post, “Towards A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower,” and am digging up all your previous thoughts on the topic, so here I am.
As a matter of personal preference, I enjoy (and endorse) commenting and and reading comments on old posts—it nudges everything a bit more toward long content.
I’m going to have to read this a few more times before I understand it fully, but I want to address one thing right away:
The way I dealt with this was to make my oaths in one month blocks. So the Republican would have to swear “I won’t have any gay sex...this month.” Even for the most lustful, this should be possible.
If, at the end of the month, this was so painful he wants to just give up on this, he can. Or if he thinks he can do it, he could also include the statement in his next month’s oath.
What I found was that there’s a very different mental feeling between “I can never do this again” and “I have to wait a month to do this.” The latter is annoying but bearable, and it’s why I included the “never make an open-ended oath” point up there.
(if you want to test this for yourself, but don’t have any repressed homosexual urges, masturbation makes a good test case)
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers. I think it’s better for something like dieting. Tell yourself you won’t eat cookies the whole month, do it in the full knowledge that you’ll start eating cookies again when the oath runs out, pig out on cookies for one day, and then when you have no desire whatsoever for any more cookies, swear to diet again for the next month.
I’m saying that your “dooming myself to a life of laziness forever” is an artificially created disaster, where none would have existed otherwise. The closeted gay thing was just giving an example of how (as I said), “For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous.”
IOW, using your “doom” model, if a person swears not to eat cookies for a month, and then fails to do so, they will now consider themselves doomed forever. That’s the kind of failure mode I’m talking about.
Hi from the future [1]! Beeminder has a version of this built in: the one-week akrasia horizon. You can change anything about a Beeminder goal, including ending it, at any time, but the change doesn’t take effect for a week. As Katja Grace once said on Overcoming Bias: “[you] can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).”
[1] I’m mildly terrified that it’s against the norms to reply to something this old. I’ve been thinking hard about your (Scott’s) recent ACX post, “Towards A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower,” and am digging up all your previous thoughts on the topic, so here I am.
As a matter of personal preference, I enjoy (and endorse) commenting and and reading comments on old posts—it nudges everything a bit more toward long content.