Hi, ex-Beeminder user here! @dreev brought me over to say hi because I was talking about this stuff.
I would definitely put myself in the “willpower probably doesn’t work like that” camp, though obviously some people think it does and some people think it doesn’t.
About being truly incorrigible… that might be me. I’m not sure. The implicit statement that anyone who hasn’t otherwise managed to show the strength of their willpower will also fail at Beeminder is an empirical one. I get the impression that, once you filter for people who think the Beeminder concept sounds promising, a lot of people actually find it works out ok. Beeminder HQ would have the numbers for that, though I don’t know if they publish them.
Obviously, though, it’s not going to be for everyone. Entering Beeminder is not “wasting money for no benefit”; it’s a risk. There’s always a chance that you might lose a bunch of money before you really feel any benefit from it. The Beeminder staff seem to show every indication of not wanting this to happen to people, and actually providing a service that will help people. That’s why @dreev has been chatting to me just now, even though I likely won’t be a customer again.
The way I failed is one in which the Beeminder system is not quite set up to handle. My productivity seems to naturally tend to go in cycles - right now I’m on one of the upswings, gradually getting done all the things that need to be done and slightly more energetic and so on. But when I’m on one of the downward swings, I start off by losing the self-awareness that I might be on one of the downward swings, and then by the time I’ve really noticed whatever systems I have have fallen apart and I’m sort of back to square one.
Beeminder gives you the chance to cancel everything if you give a week’s notice (or did back when I was playing, I assume this still works the same way). So if I was better at anticipating - and being honest with myself - then I could have prepared for a crash like that by canceling all my goals.
That still wouldn’t be particularly great though. Obviously the point is to try to stop the crashes from happening, especially when there isn’t any obvious factor that might be causing them other than my own psychology. Somehow the Beeminder stings weren’t enough to help with that for me. Maybe I’m less motivated by smallish amounts of money disappearing? (And way too cowardly to try dialing up the punishment if it didn’t seem to be working). Or maybe I have a sort of self-destructive streak that appears whenever I feel cornered? Or maybe the Beeminder effect only has a certain strength, and whatever causes my up/down cycles happened to beat it?