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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.)
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?
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.
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/
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?
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”.
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/
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.
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.
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.
well, I don’t want to say “check your privilege”, but… check your privilege.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I know. That’s what I was going for.
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.
Holding me back from what? From pursuing a strategy of combating akrasia that runs contrary to my goal of making and keeping money?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’ve had no success with negative incentives before
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.
Are you claiming that you have no akrasia and that getting rid of it isn’t valuable?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To the latter question, people on LW seem to give a hearty, unambiguous “YES”.
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.
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.