Tag Archive

Paying Is Not Punishment

Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
Paying Is Not Punishment

UPDATE: See follow-up post announcing No-Excuses Mode. An under-appreciated fact about Beeminder is that it doesn’t force you to do anything. It just puts prices on things and you continue to do whatever you feel like doing, factoring in those prices. Just like you might buy... »

The Bright Red Staircase

Wednesday, January 26th, 2022
The Bright Red Staircase

This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical and now it sounds inevitable and kind of obvious. We are making steady progress... »

Book Review: How To Change

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
Book Review: How To Change

Earlier this year we completed a lovely Beeminder book club to read behavioral scientist Katy Milkman’s new book, »

Calendialing

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021
Calendialing

This is adapted from a forum post which was adapted from a daily beemail which was adapted from a fiftieth of Brent Yorgey’s brilliant, »

Loss Aversion Aversion

Saturday, October 30th, 2021
Loss Aversion Aversion

This is part 2 of our two-part series on loss aversion. Previously we explained loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. Here we (as Beeminder) disavow loss aversion as a tool for behavior change. This isn’t like “ »

Make A Plan To Forget

Thursday, August 26th, 2021
Make A Plan To Forget

This is going to sound painfully obvious at first — “Don’t assume you’ll remember things! Create reminders!” — but bear with me. There are two useful, nonobvious things here: Sometimes you think of something you need to remember while, say, driving, or talking to someone. You can’t always email yourself or write something down but you can still do something like... »

Incentive Alignment

Saturday, May 15th, 2021
Incentive Alignment

This is a revised and slightly expanded version of something we originally wrote as part of our post on Bayesian Willpower. Immediate incentives are inordinately powerful. Beeminder’s philosophy is to find ways to make your immediate incentives... »

Bayesian Willpower

Thursday, April 8th, 2021
Bayesian Willpower

A couple weeks ago, Scott Alexander wrote “Toward a Bayesian Theory of Willpower”. This is my recap of the theory, my tentative verdict, and what I think it means for Beeminder and motivation hacking more generally. Let’s start with defining terms! Akrasia means failing to do something you rationally want to... »

Beemind What You Buy

Friday, March 12th, 2021
Beemind What You Buy

“It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, before Beeminder existed Are you about to buy something that requires ongoing time or energy? Some things don’t. A meal,... »

The Burgle Bug Fairness Principle

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021
The Burgle Bug Fairness Principle

Beeminder’s bug classification system is like so: Bitty Bugs are barely bothersome. Baneful Bugs make Beeminder blatantly wrong, but not in any breach-of-contract way, unlike… Bum-steer Bugs which may make you derail by leading you astray about the state of your graph, or, worse: Bamboozle Bugs making our marketing mendacious... »