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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

First Beeminder failure retrospective

Sand cat walking towards me by Tambako the Jaguar from flickr (CC-ND)
So it happened, and after a few months of beeminding I finally derailed on blogging commitment, costing me $5, or some tiny fraction of a bitcoin ;-p

I don't feel it was really akrasia-related in any way - just a lot of things happened that made it more difficult - each one individually was totally possible to overcome, but together they just made it too hard. I didn't adjust my commitment levels downwards early enough, so these levels which were originally fairly conservative became fairly optimistic, and one of the commitments failed.

For that matter I don't even thing there was anything wrong with my commitment level in the long term view, just that it was somewhat risky short term, and that's why it failed.

It's technically a legitimate fail, but it doesn't feel like a vindication of Beeminder's akrasia-centered model at all. Maybe just tracking the goals is more useful than putting money on the line.

2 comments:

Noumenon said...

Maybe just tracking the goals is more useful than putting money on the line.

But you didn't put any money on the line... $5 shouldn't mean anything to you. I make decisions that cost me $5 every day. Try it with $200 and see if that's enough.

taw said...

Noumenon: There wasn't really any realistic way to get this to happen by the time all problems came out, it was really too late to do any quality blogging, and I didn't want to post any crappy filler - that's a blog, not a newspaper ;-p

With more money on the line I'd probably just have more conservative target with higher safety buffer, or I'd more aggressively downgrade the goal whenever difficulties arose. These aren't bad ideas, but they wouldn't really get me to blog more.