Katja Grace, long praised by economists and now collaborating with one since joining Robin Hanson’s OvercomingBias blog, just wrote a pretty amazing article about how much Beeminder improves her life. She made several important points, one of which is particularly reblogworthy, especially if we take the liberty of rephrasing it like... »
We have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they believe firmly in... »
Say you have a hard deadline in a month and you know you’ll end up down to the wire. You check the exact time of the deadline and see that it’s 9am. Groan! That portends a brutal all-nighter. Why (oh why) couldn’t they have made it 9pm the previous night? (Same story for deadlines that... »
Economists have been wondering for at least half a century why we don’t see more use of commitment devices in the real world. In 1955, one economist speculated that the reason is risk and uncertainty, “both as to future tastes and future opportunities.” We’ve been thinking hard about how to... »
Many of us have a problem following through on our intentions. And it’s more than just a difficulty in predicting our future desires. It’s not like “Gee, I thought I wanted to get in shape but it turned out there was always... »
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