Question from the internet: What do we mean by calling Beeminder hyperrational goal tracking? [1]
Before I give my answer, here’s a recent example from the inventor of Ruby on Rails using “hyperrational” in the context of sociopathic companies: [2]
[Fines on tech companies] put a price on criminal behavior, and if the gains from committing those crimes exceed the cost of the fines, there’s a base hyper-rational calculus that says the company should continue to break the law.
So, hyperrational means excessively rational — so rational it’s irrational again? — and I’m kind of making fun of ourselves by applying it to Beeminder. But also it’s because Beeminder in a sense fights irrationality with irrationality. Homo economicus would never opt in to a commitment device except for a strategic game-theoretic reason involving other players. A perfectly rational person is perfectly cooperative with themself. A commitment device needlessly constrains your future actions. Sacrificing optionality is costly! But for humans suffering from hyperbolic discounting, it elegantly corrects for a different irrationality and leaves you more rational.
Happy now, Internet?
Last year I posed this as a quiz to the daily beemail subscribers, with a honey money bounty [3] for the best answers. I ended up giving the bounty to everyone who successfully distingished hyperrationality from meta-rationality (being rational about one’s irrationality — a key prerequisite for using Beeminder).
I was worried that some people might find it obtuse or pretentious but it turns out it’s one of the favorite taglines in the collection. Which may be more a commentary on the Beeminder audience than about any lack of obtuseness or pretentiousness.
Footnotes
[1] It’s one of our many rotating taglines. You can see them all and even vote for your favorites on our Consider.it page. Or hit refresh again and again on beeminder.com.
[2] Sociopathic companies is favorite topic of mine as well. See our posts on Psychological Pricing and The Burgle Bug Fairness Principle for my ranting.
[3] Actually this was shortly before officially introducing honey money and it was still just “premium credit” at that time. Now honey money can be used as derail credit as well.