This is embarrassingly out of date, but since it’s literally about Time Bridges, that makes it all the more apropos, right? (If you’re wondering how we even dug up something this old, you might like our recent series on backlogs and freshenable collections.)
The Future of Life Podcast is mostly about AI these days, reasonably enough. Actually it’s been particularly prescient in having that as a focus for 9 years or so. But back on the eve of 2019, they did one called “Existential Hope in 2019 and Beyond”. They interviewed several experts, including Beeminder fan Gaia Dempsey who talked about Beeminder and related strategies for what we call incentive alignment.
Since it’s a beautiful bit of Beeminder evangelism (and entirely organic and unpaid, we hasten to add) and because it coins a handy term, we wanted to preserve the relevant bit of the transcript for posterity. We’ve edited it for clarity and concision but, to keep us honest, the original recording is hosted on SoundCloud (from 20m38s to 23m59s).
Gaia Dempsey: My favorite type of tool I think is very rare: the kind that support us developing the capacity for longterm thinking, and for being true to the longterm intentions and goals that I set for myself.
Ariel Conn: Can you give some examples of those?
Gaia Dempsey: One example comes from the book Ready Player One. The main character is interacting with his VR system that he lives and breathes every single day. At a certain point the system asks him, “Do you want to activate your health module?” [It’s called the “Fitness Lockout protocol” in the book.] And without giving it too much thought, he says, “Sure, yeah, I’d like to be healthier.” And it instantiates a process whereby he’s not allowed to log in to the OASIS without going through his exercise routine every morning.
This is an interesting system design choice, because he didn’t actually do that much deep thinking about “oh yeah, this is a choice I really want to commit to”. But the system’s saying, we’re thinking through how your decision-making works, and we think that this is something that you really do want. And we think you’re going to need about three months before you make a final decision as to whether this is something you want to continue with.
So that three month period (or whatever it was in the book) is what’s known as an akrasia horizon.
Which is a term that I learned through a different tool that is sort of a real-life version of that, which is called Beeminder. The akrasia horizon is a time period that’s long enough that it will circumvent a cognitive bias that we have to really prioritize the near-term, at the expense of the future.
In the case of the Ready Player One example, the near-term desire that would circumvent his longterm health is, “I don’t feel like working out today, I just want to get into my email, or I just want to play a video game right now.” And a very similar setup is created in this tool, Beeminder, which I love to use to support some goals that I’m very motivated to meet. So it’s a tool where you can put in your goals and you can track them, either yourself by entering the data manually, or you can connect to a number of other tracking capabilities like RescueTime and others. And if you don’t stay on track with your goals, they charge your credit card. It’s a very effective motivating force.
I have a nickname I call these systems: “time bridges”. Which are really choices made by your long-term thinking self that in some way supercede the gravitational pull toward mediocrity inherent in your short-term impulses.
It’s about experimenting, too. This is one particular system that creates consequences and accountability, and I love systems. For me, if I don’t have systems in my life that help me organize the work that I want to do, I’m hopeless. So that’s why I like to collect and am an avid taster of different systems. And I’ll try anything to see what works. I think that’s important. It’s a process of experimentation to see what works for you.
Amen to all of that.