Tag Archive

X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Silky Smooth Beeminder Trend Lines

Friday, December 2nd, 2022
X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Silky Smooth Beeminder Trend Lines

As you likely know if you’ve ever beeminded your weight, you can add a moving average line on top of your data on your Beeminder graph. You can also add a so-called aura around your datapoints. The idea is to see trends in your data without being distracted by daily fluctuations, particularly when data is coming from... »

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, »

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 “ »

Loss Aversion vs The Endowment Effect

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021
Loss Aversion vs The Endowment Effect

This is part 1 of a two-part series. First we explain loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. (Spoiler: loss aversion is a generalization of the endowment effect.) Asking Google how those things are different currently yields a fog of opaque logorrhea, so we hope this is... »

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... »

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective

Saturday, October 3rd, 2020
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective

By popular demand — specifically, being the winner of our poll — we’re catching you up on the latest research on the marshmallow test!   The »

X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Computing and Visualizing Level Curves of the Days-To-Derailment Function for the Upcoming Yellow Brick Half-Plane New World Order

Thursday, May 14th, 2020
X-Treme Nerd Interlude: Computing and Visualizing Level Curves of the Days-To-Derailment Function for the Upcoming Yellow Brick Half-Plane New World Order

For background on the Yellow Brick Half-Plane that a normal human could conceivably care about, see our previous post on how we’re killing the custom lane widths feature. This post is strictly for abnormal humans, and/or, more realistically, for ourselves, because math... »

Social Reality And The Canard About Keeping Your Goals To Yourself

Thursday, November 21st, 2019
Social Reality And The Canard About Keeping Your Goals To Yourself

It’s now been ten years since the publication of Gollwitzer et al’s paper about, as the internet interpreted it, keeping your goals to yourself. I think I’ve heard variants of “did you hear that science shows that you’re... »

Does Practice Make Perfect?

Saturday, April 7th, 2018
Does Practice Make Perfect?

Ivana Kurecic is a PhD student in quantum information theory who beeminds dozens of things. One of her hobbies is translating incomprehensible scientific papers into stuff you should care about, at Happy Turtle Things, and today we’re lucky to get a taste of that (with... »

Negative Reinforcement ≠ Punishment

Friday, January 12th, 2018
Negative Reinforcement ≠ Punishment

Prof Michele Gregoire Gill is back! In her previous post she mentioned that Beeminder, in large part, motivates her via negative reinforcement. If you think that makes her sound... »