Derailing Is Not Failing; or, Beeminder Revenue Proportional To User Awesomeness

Akrasia
14

I really think this depends a lot on the goal. For instance, @narthur writes about his work commitments goal:

So in that case, the ideal is to never derail, and there’s no correlation between awesomeness and revenue for one derailment, but that changes if we look over the long term.

It’s worth looking at different types of derailments:

  1. For a goal where you never want to derail, but you derail due to akrasia.
  2. A goal where you set it up so that you can choose to pay $X to derail, you don’t choose to pay, but you derail anyway due to akrasia.
  3. A goal where you set it up so that you can choose to pay $X to derail, you choose to pay, and you decide in hindsight, taking the outside view, that it was worth it.
  4. A goal where you set it up so that you can choose to pay $X to derail, you choose to pay, and you decide in hindsight, taking the outside view, that it was NOT worth it - that is, you regret your choice.

With derailment type 3, there is a correlation between awesomeness of your choice and revenue. With type 4 there isn’t.

With types 1 and 2, the derailment was caused by akrasia rather than by your choice. So the relevant correlation with revenue is not single-incident awesomeness, but rather awesomeness over the entire time period preceding the derailment - like your example of the $1000 pledge paid for UVIs being worth it for the 1000 previous days.

In that kind of situation, let’s look at what happens as we increase the pledge amount X. With very low X, it won’t be motivating at all, so very little awesomeness. As we increase X, motivation increases, so the number of derailments decrease. Finally, at a certain point, making X larger will have no additional effect on motivation but will continue to increase revenue. So for example:

X      % derailment   awesomeness     avg revenue
1        50             50              0.50
10       20             80              2
100      5              95              5
1000     1              99              10
10000    1              99              100

Here awesomeness is the % of the time you do what you want, which is to always keep your commitment.

So under this model, awesomeness and revenue are correlated up to the motivation point.

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