Past guest-blogger, famous Python hacker, and my friend David MacIver (@drmaciver) has thoughts on the value of creating personal rules:
It’s a powerful insight, I think. And Beeminder goals seem to be a central example but David seems to be arguing that you can get that value without Beeminder and that he prefers to do so because derailing creates negative emotions. The thrust of our “derailing is good-actually” series of posts (see the sidebar) is to mentally reframe derailments. I wonder if I can convince David that Beeminder can be the best of all worlds… Other than costing money, I suppose. But hopefully you get what you pay for?
Yeah. Personally at least I find the negative emotions around a periodic Beeminder derail to be significantly less than the accrued distress and uncertainty around a slowly-decaying personal rule with no external enforcement mechanism. But, as you say, that definitely requires a certain framing around derailing. And probably also being good at setting appropriate stakes for each Beeminder goal.
I think this is a slight misreading of what I’m saying. I’m not saying that I prefer to do it without Beeminder because derailing creates negative emotions, I’m saying that the negative emotions are a key part of the entire experience, and I think Beeminder is a good implementation of the thing I’m pointing to when it works.
I do prefer to do it without Beeminder these days, but that’s not for any reasons contained in the post. I don’t really have a good explanation of why, I think Beeminder just started being aversive for me, but I don’t think it’s a bad way of doing the thing I’m pointing at, I just stopped wanting to use it.
Beeminder essentially helped me to do this myself. I still have a few goals and they derail occasionally mostly because I believe in the product and want it to exist; but also because tracking a couple of things this way is important to me.
I think the incentives are far from perfect - and the more I’ve found to be a background rather than a foreground process in life, the less I care about the derailments financially.
But, the idea of derailing (not honoring my commitments) is solid and the is a nice way to really initiate folks to it, especially if they are impacted by the .
is prone to hedonic adaptation in a way that “intuition or whatever” isn’t so prone to. Obviously escalating pledges help with this, so I know it’s a known bug/feature and am in no way suggesting an improvement to it, it’s just part of how Beeminder lost some razzle-dazzle over time and “awareness of the guy in the mirror” gained some for me.
edit: the forum wysiwyg editor doesn’t believe in the dollar sign character, replaced with emoji .
incentives are far from perfect - and the more I’ve found