Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts
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?
A common suggestion with these sort of contracts is to do things you will succeed at in order to get used to succeeding. If you say “I will either lose $100 or ask out the person I like,” and then you don’t ask them out, then you end up $100 poorer and less confident than you were before. (This is a pretty big risk for a confidence building measure!)
Compare to something like “I will either lose $100 or smile at the person I like this week.” Likely to succeed, grow a bit, and be ready to step things up a bit next time.
I also recommend seeing a professional, or getting a book devoted to anxiety alleviation. That seems like a tool much more precisely focused at getting you where you want to be.
When I think about these “precommitment contracts” I anticipate that I’d just fail anyway even if I signed up.
Generally, people make decisions on the margin, and so there should be some contract where making that contract will change you from not doing something to doing something. It does seem to have very different usefulness for different people, though.
I think a completely objective goal would be better, e.g. “I must do each activity at least 5 times”.
There are a number of problems associated with this kind of forced commitment :
(1) As Pj Eby says: “what pushes you forward holds you back”. By using fear as motivator, you activate the “pain brain”, which is triggered to run away from problems, instead of the “gain brain”, which is directed towards success.
http://dirtsimple.org/2011/05/building-dream.html
(2) Forcing yourself to solve one problem will often lead you to neglect other important stuff, or make you solve the problem in a way that fits the definition that you have commited to, but does not achieve the goal you had in mind.
http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2012/12/consider-not-setting-goals-in.html
(3) “Burning the ships” may be a bad idea if this additional commitment does not achieve the goal either. Often, commitment ist not the weak link in a chain that makes a project fail
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2009/05/21/dont-burn-your-ships/
Thank you for writing this, especially for the links. I was immediately thinking about P.J.Eby while reading the article. Motivating oneself through fear could work for a simple physical activity where no thinking is involved, but otherwise, fear freezes the brain. And social activities require some brain work.
I also had a bad feeling about increasing social skills by doing weird things. (Such as: asking stranger about time when you have a watch, or sitting on the floor in the dancing room.) This could be a test of courage, but I think in long term it also reinforces the idea that social relationships are meaningless. -- How about doing something meaningful, something useful instead? Such as: actually helping people who need help. You will get human contact and you will feel good about yourself; thus, putting these two things together, you will feel good about human contact… and at that point developing social skills will be easier.
So my advice (I am not sure it is a good advice, just a first idea) would probably be: “Find some volunteer organization and tell them you are willing to do some work for them, under condition that the work includes social activities (so you wouldn’t for example just sit at home and make a new website for them). Some organization may have some meaningful work for you. And then you would have real social contacts, not just some meaningless acts of courage.”
Reinforcement must be done carefully, because it is too easy to reinforce something we actually didn’t want to. Generally, any kind of punishment is probably wrong because as a side effect it also punishes (1) noticing that we are doing something wrong, and (2) trying to self-improve in general.
I think it’s much better to commit to do specific activities then to commit to decreasing your anxiety by half. You don’t want to have to think to much about what do when you are faced with your exercises. You want to just do them.
I don’t think that’s true. If you don’t continue to stretch yourself after a week is over you will lose quite a bit of the confidence that you gained during that time shortly afterwards.
At least that true based on my own experience of doing socially stressful thinks everyday for periods longer than a week. Sure it does raises your confidence to some extend but it’s not like I can now easily do what it did there at the end of the challenge.
I don’t think there a need to do stuff that’s simply stupid. A good day 1 exercise is to ask 30 strangers for the time. Bonus points if you do it as fast as possible and really ask every group of strangers that you come about.
Day 2: Do the same thing while wearing a watch yourself.
Day 3: Do the same thing while pointing at the watch you are wearing.
There no need to bind yourself to achieve insanely high results in a week. Just set a lower goal for a week and set a higher goal after the week is over.
Actually 3 sounds easier than 2 -- people will think you suspect your watch is off and you want to adjust it, where in 2 (assuming that they notice your watch) they may think that you just want to bother them for no particular reason, or that you’re so distracted that you don’t even remember you’re wearing a watch.
It could very well be that there are people for whom 2 is easier than 3. When it comes to social confidence different people have different issues.
The exercises had that order in the source from which I took them. For myself 3 was much harder than 2.
The reaction I got on day 1 didn’t differ much than the reaction I got on day 2. Most of the time people don’t care that much about yourself. If you ask them for the time they either don’t want to spend any time, don’t have a clock or they do the easy thing of just giving you the time.
Some responses seem to be saying that a better tactic would be to train social confidence by performing smaller more manageable actions/ goals rather than aiming for insanely high goals in a very short time span. For example if you create with a graded heirarchy of situations/ actions which induce social anxiety, then you can start by performing the actions that you have rated the lowest, and once you feel comfortable with those actions, work your way up.
This is the approach I’ve been using so far. For me the method has been working ok, but the main problem I’ve found with it is that it takes a hell of a lot of time to work through the graded heirarchy to the items towards the top of the list. This is why I’m considering the idea of just starting with the insane goals. If you can do the hardest goals straight of, then it seems that you don’t need to waste time with the easier goals. The hardest goals will take a lot more motivation though, and this is where the huge commitment contracts come in.
Good question. The reading that I’ve done around this is mostly limited to basic books on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I can’t site many specifics, but from what I’ve read so far the idea that if you force yourself into a situation, and keep yourself in that situation until your anxiety level diminishes by around half, then the next time that you are faced with the situation it will cause you less social anxiety. So far this correlates with my experience for situations that cause low or medium levels of anxiety, but I haven’t actually tried it for situations which cause huge amounts of anxiety.
Some comments have recommended seeing a professional. Really, for me this is more of a self improvement project rather than me trying to tackle an anxiety disorder. My social confidence I think is probably if anything above average, but It is still something to have more of. Professional help in a project like this would probably be useful, but my understanding is that professional help is expensive.
I used to think that I should drink olive oil to gain weight. I want to gain weight and 100g of olive oil equals roughly 800kcal. The problem is that I upped the amount I drank to fast over the days and felt nauseous.
As a result my body learned to feel nauseous when drinking olive oil and I can now drink less than I could before I tried to train myself to drink it.
The same thing is also possible with social goals. Some people can develop a phobia if you are under too much stress. Another thing that could happen is that they surpress emotions which isn’t that healthy.
If those goals are to low than you could look into medium sized goals that can be achieved with a medium sized contract.
What you’re dealing with is known as an ugh field around here.
Why do you believe this is true?
I’ve never use stickk or beeminder but I have made commitments in life and what I’ve found is that committing myself to do something is a good way to do that thing but that’s about it. For instance, I signed up for a marathon and fear of failure made me go out and train. I did the marathon and then stopped running a lot. If I want to start running a decent number of miles/week again I’ll probably have to sign up for another marathon. Now, some fraction of people will probably sign up for a marathon, start running a lot, realize that they love it, and reorganize the rest of their lives to run a lot. But not most people. I think that is the fallacy of any temporary commitment. Unless you discover that you love doing whatever you committed to doing, you’ll probably just revert to your old behavior once the commitment is over.
That’d probably get you thrown out of the club by the bouncers.
I think it probably results in a bouncher coming to you and asking if everything is all right. That probably a good moment to tell them that you have to go to the toilet and move there. Lock yourself in the toilet. Once you come out, should they ask you tell them that everything is alright again and don’t sit down on the floor again.
Yes; now that I remember about that, I once responded to a bouncer calling me out (though the thing I had done was different than sitting on the floor) that way. (But bouncers are less friendly in certain places than in others, IME.)
Unless peirce is interested in going back to the clubs, that sounds like it could make the activity even better (from a getting-over-social-anxiety perspective).
Depending on peirce’s psychology, doing something in a club and being thrown out might be analogue to cautiously stepping out of your house after staying there for months for fear of spiders and ending up covered in tarantulas.
Part of what such exercises are about is demostrating yourself that you have agency.
If you lose control over the situation in a way that you didn’t expect beforehand and people disapprove of you in that way it doesn’t encourage yourself to see your own agency.
Personally, I upvoted this, but I will warn you that you may be getting an abnormal amount of downvotes, not because of the content, but because of the formatting. People around here are extremely picky about non standard formatting. I think that actually your current formatting is just fine and perfectly reasonable, but I am sure that there are some that will get annoyed by it. It’s slightly silly, but I do recommend that you change this to the standard formatting if you don’t want random downvotes.
Ok thanks for the heads up. I tried to change the formatting, but I’ve either made it worse or nothing has changed. How could I go about reformatting the post? Sorry from the not very computer literate.
I’ve fixed the formatting. You can do this by copy-pasting the text into the article editor from a plain text editor (that doesn’t support formatting) and then adding the necessary formatting (such as headings and italics) in the article editor. Alternatively, you can edit the HTML source by clicking “Edit HTML Source” button in the article editor, and remove all nonstandard formatting tags from there.
Thanks very much
I’m going to snarkily suggest that LWers start reading articles via Screen Reader to reduce the relevance of formatting. It may or may not be possible to train such that text to speech can be understood faster than reading visually (I’ve only heard extremely vague anecdotes on this, but it’d be interesting to test).
For future reference, how does LW article formatting work, and what is standard? I physically can’t see to tell the difference if ever I find reason to post an article, and would rather avoid annoying people over something like that.
I don’t think this is likely. Standard human speech is about 150 wpm, and while people can get up to listening to at 2-3 times that, it takes significant practice. I get the impression that many more people can read at 300 wpm than can listen at 300 wpm, and so on up the scale.
Listening is also very unforgiving to attention lapses or sections that deserve careful thought, whereas when reading normally it is easy to pause or ‘rewind.’
My experience has been that composing articles on the “create new article” page leads to standard formatting, and that if you copy text in from another source you need to be careful to scrub it of formatting first. (One way that may work for that is to paste it into the html source, but that can lead to other problems. Copying it into a text file editor like notepad seems like a better approach.)
have you ever considered that a lack of social confidence is actually just a manifestation of humility and maybe it is a good thing? That’s how I look at it, anyway.
I’ve considered it, but having more social confidence at least in the way I’ve been using the term in this post, seems to me to be generally a good thing. I recognise that it is not good to be overly confident in your abilities to the point that you are unrealistic and delusional about them. But I’m more talking about training the ability to engage is social situations which you find uncomfortable, and I see type of social confidence as generally a good thing because it opens up your options more, and means that social fear acts as a smaller constraint on your actions.
I’m not sure whether the kind of confidence that involved in asking “have you seen my pet fish?” is the kind that’s generally a good thing.
It’s not the kind of action where it’s very valuable to be able to perform it.
It might make sense to train on something that doesn’t have negative externalities to other people.
Yes, but some people are humbler than is warranted.
My issue with commitment contracts is that I have no reason to believe they will do anything but make me miserable, and I don’t have enough money to risk. If I precommit to pay $5 if I fail at a certain task, I have no reason to believe that at the end of the given time period, I won’t be short 1% of my total wealth and worse off emotionally.
I find it interesting that you think there is no reason to believe that a financial incentive would change your behavior.
Elsewhere he sounds like he tried some other kind of negative incentives and it didn’t work.
Value of information. Unless you have literally zero interest in finding out, there should be some sum of money, possibly less than $5, equal to the value of learning what you will actually do when you set up a contract for yourself.
That’s tricky. The experience of setting up a commitment contract for 0.0001% of your wealth is unlikely to provide any learning as to what you will actually do in response to a commitment contract of 5% (or 50%) of your wealth.
I’ve never attempted a commitment contract but I don’t really care for them in principle. I don’t really want to find a way to force myself to do things that I don’t want to do. What I really want much more than that is to figure out how to become comfortable doing the things that I’m not comfortable doing.
To take your example, if you are uncomfortable socially it is because you have an underlying belief that these social situations could be very harmful or painful for you. That belief is most likely due to stuff that really did happen to you. You probably were rejected in your past and it was painful. I think the answer is not to find a way to force yourself to interact despite the fear but rather to find a way to reassure yourself so that you can interact without forcing yourself through fear. To add one more thing, I don’t think it should be anyone’s goal to be impervious to the pain of rejection. Rather I think its better to aspire to be someone who is confident that they can bear rejection and bounce back from it and learn from it. It is supposed to be painful but it should not be so painful that you become paralyzed with fear forever more. I have much more to say about it but this is a pretty good summary of my feelings on the matter.
More extreme commitment contracts.
One of the tactics I have heard is to pay a friend a certain amount at the start of the night. Each new person or group you start talking to they give you come of the money back. What ever is left you friend gets to keep.
I’m not sure that adding more stress would help overcome social anxiety but if you think it will work then it is probably worth a trial run of $150 of $15 per group you say hi to—that must be done in one night. It it works you can start upping the total number of group you have to talk to but keeping the $150 the same.
This is getting dangerously close to ‘self-help’ territory.
Commitment contracts may be great for tangible things like losing weight or whatever, but I can’t imagine it would work for things like this.
If you genuinely have a problem with social anxiety that is disrupting your daily life, it might be best to see a professional about it.
I’m really glad this was the first comment. While reading the post I kept thinking, ‘OK, extreme commitment contracts are interesting, but why did peirce pick such a bad example? I’m pretty sure social anxiety doesn’t work like that for most people.’ Then I got to the conclusion.
Really, it doesn’t even have to be disrupting your daily life. When someone says “I want to be less anxious,” seeing a professional is way above merciless commitment to exposure therapy on the list of obvious things to try. Commit to doing that, if you want. (And if you’re still really into the exposure therapy, start with making eye contact with strangers in public and maybe smiling. Build up small successes first, and it’ll be easier to avoid the paralysis of feeling bad about bad feelings.)
What sort of professional do you see if you want to do some minor self-help thing like improve social skills?
Plus points if you can cite peer reviewed studies that indicate that said professional is effective at increasing people social skills.
Cognitive-Behavioral therapy (CBT) is very effective and there is much published research on it; I suggest you have a look (peaigr has linked a meta-study below).
I think under the definition of CBT of the study that peaigr mentions peirce, he’s already engaging in CBT when doing his exposure therapy.
The study also says:
It basically provides no evidence that seeking a professional has an effect that’s better than what peirce is already doing.
Furthermore the study is about raising the confidence of people who have a low baseline and peirce says that he already has an above average baseline.
The studies also seem to be measuring decreased social anxiety as a goal and don’t measure the outcome of successful social interactions.
We’re talking about social anxiety, not social skills; they are anticorrelated but one is not the same thing as the lack of the other. Someone might have no particular reluctance in interacting with others but still be unfun to be around (low social anxiety, low social skills), and someone else might instinctively flinch from social interactions but if they somehow overcome that (e.g. by drinking alcohol, or by the interaction being initiated by the other person, or by being already friends with them) their company is very enjoyable (high social anxiety, high social skills).
The ability to start social interactions is a social skill. It’s not the only one that matter but it’s a valuable one.
The goal that peirce persues seems to be to social skillbuilding. Tackling anxiety is just a means to get there.
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.
Dahlen, while I opposed some specific details in your exhortation I support your sentiment and intent. I can see that you are intuitively in touch with a social group that some of us may be less familiar with. You seem to have some knowledge of what motivates that group effectively. I’m sincerely interested in what you suggest is the optimal way for the archetypical person from that lower income class to increase their motivation and self control. Is there another tactic that works well for people in that reference class that is neglected in lesswrong culture? Please share.
Heh, well, it may be that people in the poorer stratum of society have a lower chance to possess herculean self-control in the first place; good motivation and self-control, after all, do propel people from poverty in places with some social mobility.
First off, the subgroup we’re considering—that fraction of poor people who want to increase their motivation and self-control—may not really be common or representative. It certainly seems to be predominantly a struggle of people from the middle and upper classes. I’m not really sure very poor people have the conditions for wanting to be more productive but failing to modify their behavior accordingly. That requires some sort of infrastructure to ensure your comfort while you fail at your goal of becoming motivated. Perhaps other people (e.g. parents) affording to support you, or a cushy job that sometimes pays you to play Solitaire and check Facebook… If you’re really poor and seek motivation, you generally only need to look around you, notice your shitty living conditions. Or you could just not seek motivation and remain complacent (which happens, a lot). But it’s hardly possible to seek it and be unable to find it. It’s only a little higher up the income scale, at the lower middle level, that it becomes easier to procrastinate comfortably.
Procrastination is still mostly an individual problem, and the solutions need to be tailored to a particular individual’s reasons for procrastinating; it’s just that, as with all things, fancier solutions become available as income raises. When all you own is your body and perhaps some tools or a plot of land, the path to productivity is a strong work ethic. (That is how virtually all my family views this issue, and my mom’s basically the living example of work ethic. The only person in my family that has heard of Pomodoros and thinks about productivity like us at LW lives in a big, fancy house in a nice residential area in the heart of the city.)
(The following is not necessarily related to motivation, but is relevant to the previous discussion about money.) It may also be worth noting that restraint in spending money is usually vital to climbing into the middle class (you’ll never get to save enough for a nice place to live if you blow all your money on stupid shit the first time it falls into your hands), and that there are class-specific ways of conceptualizing money in the first place. (I remember RibbonFarm having a nice article about this.) When you’re not rich, money is strictly something you get for working. It’s never ever something you have to spend to work more. An investment had better be damn obvious to be registered as such. That’s why I said it was a very upper-middle-class thing to do, to risk money to get motivated.
It’s also very common for people at the lower-middle income lever and lower to attend their financial needs before lofty stuff like self-improvement for its own sake. A worthy endeavour is one that gets you more money at the same time, or improves your earning capacity. (Example: after high school I wanted to take a gap year to dedicate it to learning what I want, at a self-imposed pace, but that decision got vetoed by my parents; they thought it was high time for me to prepare for entering the workforce, and worried about no longer being able to support me.)
Hopefully this answer is satisfactory; I wish I could say akrasia is a solved problem for me, but it isn’t, so my answer was more on the descriptive side, rather than the normative. I can’t speak as an authority on this, just as an observation point placed in the middle of a certain kind of crowd.
But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.
A lot of poor people with a good work ethic work in a way that’s quite taxing but that’s not the most effective way to spend their time to get ahead.
I think the average person on lesswrong has the knowledge and intelligence to double their salary in a year if akrasia would be no issue.
I don’t see where you get the notion that the kind of self-improvement you see on lesswrong is self-improvement for its own sake. Most people at lesswrong engage in self-improvement to build skills that help them to be more effective in life. That means being healthy, being better at social relations, making more money and changing the world.
Er… Not quite. That work ethic proved to be quite useful for propelling her from dirt-poor subsistence farmer status (as her parents were) to enjoying certain middle-class comforts. That’s why I can sit here and talk to wealthy Californian programmers in good English instead of stacking hay or feeding the chickens. As a control group of sorts, her siblings (and there were a lot of them, since we’re talking about a poor family) didn’t quite have the same drive, especially in the academic sense, and so they managed to raise themselves somewhere from not quite as high to not at all.
Of course, middle-class in my country is not quite the same as middle-class in the US. The median income here is way below your poverty line.
Yeah. That’s what I warned against in the last paragraph—I’m not that capable of saying how poor people should improve their motivation, so I described how they usually do.
Well, nowhere. Because that’s not what I believe. When I mentioned self-improvement for its own sake, I meant “self-improvement for its own sake like I wanted to do in my gap year”, not “self-improvement for its own sake like all self-improvement discussed on LW is”.
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/
It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, since “check your privilege” gets used a lot in some places by some folks that I really don’t like and avoid to associate with. It means that some aspects of other people’s normal existence just fly over your head because of some assumptions in your worldview that exist because you’ve been living a very sheltered life. It’s a bit like—well, I don’t want to say this either, because worst argument in the world and all that—rebellious teenagers thinking “Man, it would be pretty awesome to live on the streets and dumpster dive for a while, as a big “fuck you” to the establishment. It can’t be that bad—I’ll make do.”
In this context, said privilege in need of checking is the belief that poor people can and should spend their money like rich people do, if on a smaller scale, and that the fear of losing their money has a similar mostly positive impact on their mindsets as it does on rich people. It’s the privilege of precommitting to give away a large sum, and then fail, and then give it away, and then return to your normal life with a sense of loss, but no seriously ugly repercussions. And then preach it to other people, “regardless of their income”.
Yeah, I thought about asking something like that in my original post, but forgot about it. For those who want to attempt something like this but aren’t quite swimming in cash, it would be a good idea to have some form of non-monetary incentive.
Notice that this distinction is entirely social and psychological and has nothing to do with the actual micro-economic incentives that apply at various levels of class status or wealth. You describe how poorer people get more value per marginal dollar added. While this means that a commitment device that uses money costs more in practical value. However, the same consideration applies to the motivational impact of any given monetary incentive.
Diminishing marginal utility applies to both sides.
I suggest checking how your perception of lack of privilege is holding you back. Some limitations are real. Others, like this one, are merely perceived.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying. Is it that poor people can use the same contract structure by just reducing the money they pledge according to how the utility is weighted?
So, if, say, someone making $3000/month (say expenses leave them with $1000 after all is said and done) is trying commitment contracts, it’d be reasonable for them to pledge $1000, or maybe $500 if their savings are in dire straights, but someone making $1000 a month (who is probably in debt at the end of the month) should still find a monetary value greater than $0.00 that they can justify pledging? What if someone has net negative income, where the value of overcoming akrasia might be the difference between bankrupsy and financial stability, but the money they have available to pledge would come out of there “please don’t take everything I own that could possibly get me back into the economy” fund, where failure would be the difference between inescapable poverty and the (still crappy but slightly less so) status quo? I’m assuming pledging negative money on failure is obviously not allowed.
Diminishing marginal utility of money applies on both sides of the equation to the same degree. To whatever extent this motivation strategy is prejudiced against ‘poor people’ the disadvantage is mediated by psychological profiles associated with that class, not by the micro-economic incentives present. This does not mean that the problem is unimportant but it is important not to conflate the two. This comment is a (minor and entirely non-offensive) misuse of moral authority.
NOTE: I’m not advocating financial commitment contracts for poor people. I’m not advocating financial commitment contracts at all, for anyone. They do work for some people but I know my psychology well enough to know that they have a toxic influence on me personally if I try that style of influence on myself. People can and should do whatever works for them. But I’ll leave championing commitment contracts to someone who likes them. (I’d rather champion, say, self rewards strategies for ugh field removal.)
It’s more complicated than that. As explained in Thinking: Fast and Slow, most people are risk adverse in gains, risk prone in losses, and weigh losses more heavily for gains, but whereas for well-off people gains and losses are measured from the status quo, for the very poor they’re counted from a higher level, so that up to a certain point getting more money feels more like a reduced loss than a gain (which is why poor people are more likely to spend sizeable chunks of money on lotteries).
So, it’s well possible that the risk of losing 1% of one’s money has a different motivational effect for someone very poor than for someone well off.
I have no argument with the proposition that social class, financial wealth and the associated ingrained habits of thought can change the psychological responses to stimulus.
Yeah, I know. That’s what I was going for.
Holding me back from what? From pursuing a strategy of combating akrasia that runs contrary to my goal of making and keeping money?
I mean precisely the reversal of the “check your privilege” charge quoted. Privilege related thinking distortion is interfering not with the thoughts of those to whom you make your demand but instead is evident in your own comment. To whatever extent this is a problem that generalises to self-limitation in other more important areas it represents an opportunity for you, not a social obligation for others.
You basically just “no u”-ed me. Needless to say, I’m unconvinced. If you have good reason to believe that your model of the world is accurate and mine is wrong, then please come back with arguments rather than a mere prompt for me to switch from my possibly biased view to your possibly biased one.
Also, 1) I don’t really buy into this whole privilege notion as much as it may seem that I do, see the other comments; 2) what you call “self-limitation” and “holding you back” I call “being careful with spending” and it’s worked awesome for me so far; 3) I’d really like to know why you think that my unwillingness to spend money in this specific way is such a liability for me. Why not just shrug and say “okay, this cheapskate can go get motivated some other way” instead?
I have given multiple paragraphs of explanation both to your self and to another user. It would be one thing to say “I disagree with the reasoning you have given” but it is quite another to say “you have not made arguments you have merely ”. This is a disingenuous social move that is more common than I would like and one that I hold in contempt. I’m not going to engage further with this kind of debate tactic or reasoning style.
Your contribution to this thread represents an attempt to influence social behavior and normative beliefs via moral authority. You may consider the proposed normative beliefs summarily rejected for the previously expressed reasons and your influence in that direction opposed to whatever small extent a few comments entail.
Straw man. I’ve said no such thing. In fact, I’ve made quite clear declarations to the contrary.
Oh. Sorry. Then I suppose I’m bad at identifying arguments supporting a given conclusion. (Which is not very surprising, given that I understood maybe about half of what you said.) Also, I wrote that comment before reading the rest of your replies in the subthread.
Sorry again. Please don’t get mad.
This pretty much nailed my issues with this strategy. I have less than $1000 I can actually use (and that I avoid using unless what I’m using it on is something extremely useful. Which usually means software that’s not worth its price tag that I don’t have the patience to figure out how to develop myself.) My parents are effectively gatekeepers as it is (which really should have ceased being the case 7 years ago), and this environment is less and less helpful as time goes on. What I need to do is find a way to become independent, both financially and in terms of mobility, and throwing away huge chunks of my money when I’ve had no success with negative incentives before will just make things worse.
You should mention that in the other comment—‘I’ve tried something similar before and it didn’t work’ is more reasonable-sounding than ‘nah, that wouldn’t work’.
Are you claiming that you have no akrasia and that getting rid of it isn’t valuable?
If you are poor you can just lower the amount of money that you put into the commitment contract to have the same psychological value has the same amount of money has to upper-middle class people.
Maybe a $10 contract that you take equal a $1000 contract that an upper-middle class person takes.
Well. Am I claiming that I have no akrasia and that getting rid of it (of something I don’t presumably have) isn’t valuable? Did I say anything about the worthlessness of getting rid of akrasia? Not as far as I remember, in fact I think it’s a valuable pursuit. Did I confess to not having any problems at all with akrasia? Why, I think I actually mentioned the contrary somewhere in there. So no, I’m not claiming that! (Not many people are likely to hold that position, so don’t ask that question.)
Now for your actual concern—well, yes, getting rid of akrasia is valuable, but it’s not necessarily economically valuable, in that not all related self-modifications increase your future potential to earn, or provide you with some good of an economic nature. Just like making friends or increasing the accuracy of your model of the world, it has a messy relationship with economic value, although nobody could just flat-out claim that it’s not valuable in any sense.
I shall point you to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here—defeating akrasia falls into the highest category of the pyramid, “self-actualization”, and poorer folks just have a lot of stuff screaming at them from the lower levels of the pyramid. The choice is between maybe failing and losing money and feeling like shit, or buying some stuff that’s been on your wishlist for a long time or paying off a debt or Omega knows what else.
Obviously it crossed my mind. But my point was that before you answer the question of how much to pledge, you first have to give a certain answer to the question of whether to pledge anything at all. To the latter question, people on LW seem to give a hearty, unambiguous “YES”. That’s what I’m taking issue with. From my (short) experience, it’s like if you even say out loud that no, you don’t think that it’s a good idea for yourself and you aren’t going to try it, people are going to try to pressure you into trying it anyway. Or downvote. Saying “No thanks, I like my money” basically begets the answer “Well then you must like your akrasia too!”. It’s at this point that issues of social class and status rear their ugly head, and you begin suspecting that this isn’t about giving each other good advice in everybody’s best interest, but rich folks wanting to be among other rich folks and using costly means of combating akrasia to indirectly gauge your socioeconomic class.
So you claim that you don’t have any akrasia for activities that would earn you money?
Social confidence that gets trained in the example above is quite useful when it comes to succeeding at job interviews and negotiating for a higher paycheck.
I wouldn’t say that my own social confidence is very low but I know that I would make more money if I had higher social confidence.
I wouldn’t. Some people are practiced stoics who wouldn’t flinch when they lose money. Those people don’t profit from commitment contracts.
On the other hand valuing your money doesn’t result in commitment contracts being useless. It rather should make them work better.
I would also add that not every commitment contract has to be about money. You can do something like clean the flat of one of your friends if you fail your commitment. There are many ways to find uncomfortable things that you can use as punishment for breaking a commitment contract that don’t involve money.