Maybe Beeminder isn't primarily a tool for helping you stick to your goals?

Akrasia
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I’ve been mulling over what Beeminder is actually for, and I’ve come to a rather contentious conclusion. I think that I’ve been getting it wrong all these years, and so has everyone else, including the Beeminder founders themselves(!)

I posted an earlier version of this in the Discord, and got some pushback from those who find the standard framing useful for them. Nevertheless, I think that framing misses something deeply important. If the normal way of thinking about Beeminder works for you, great, but perhaps at least consider what I have to say here anyway as an alternate framing.

The intentionally provocative way to put it is that I don’t believe in Beeminder as a tool to achieve one’s goals.

In fact, I have come to disbelieve the two-level model of goals, where there are things you “want” and things you “want to want”.

I know it subjectively feels like you want to want some things but can’t bring yourself to it in the moment. I claim that this is an illusion.

You may be familiar with the press-secretary model of the brain:

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going “a most judicious choice, sire”.

https://x.com/stevenkaas/status/165572417811525632

Your conscious mind isn’t in charge, isn’t the president of your brain. Rather, it’s the president’s press secretary, in charge of publishing explanations and justifications.

It feels to you like your conscious mind is in charge, that you actually believe in your explanations, but that’s just because actually believing something helps you convince others of that thing. You don’t need to lie if you believe it yourself. It takes more mental effort to keep two sets of books, so you just keep one.

I recommend The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson for more on this topic.

The things you “want to want”, but don’t actually do, are the things your press secretary has announced you want, but which you don’t actually want. Just like how politicians are hypocrites and make campaign promises that they have no intention of carrying out, the same applies to your brain. Humans exist in a social context, and everything we do needs to be spun to shape the narrative to the people around us. We do this by default, without explicitly thinking about it: “thinking about it” is a tool that exists in the first place for doing that spinning.

The thing that would terrify me the most is if a press secretary staged a coup and forced the president to actually carry out his campaign promises. The one saving grace of democracy is that politicians are hypocrites! To win elections, politicians promise things that sound good but actually are terrible, and then don’t do them once in office. The way taboo tradeoffs work, the way to appeal to people is to promise that we’ll “pay any price” to overcome [insert bad thing here], and similar absurdities, and they’d drive the country to ruin if while in office they stuck to that instead of making reasonable tradeoffs.

(For more in this topic, see The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan.)

The same applies to your brain. I really really don’t want the press secretary to be in charge, especially if the press secretary actually believes the absurd campaign promises.

To the extent that Beeminder puts the press secretary of your brain in charge, allowing it to force you to stick to the good-sounding things you “want to want”, that is utterly terrible and destructive.

Thankfully, Beeminder (used correctly) isn’t that!

Back to politics a moment: how could it better? I don’t like it that politicians promise these absurd things, even if most nice-sounding campaign promises don’t get carried out. I wish politicians were held to task for their promises—not so that they will carry them out, but so that they moderate themselves, and tell the public the ugly truth. The best policies involve careful tradeoffs, not flowery ideological commitments, and I wish that politicians would be forced to admit that.

No politician can choose to be honest like this, because it would lose them votes. But if all politicians had to, then it would lose them all votes, and none would have a relative disadvantage. So maybe it would be better if all politicians were forced to commit to their campaign promises, for instance by having to stake their own money on it. Ideally this would hold them back from promising unreasonable things.

You have to be really careful with this! The bad outcome here is for politicians to commit to their existing flowery-but-terrible sounds-good idealogical promises. That would suck. Thus I’m skeptical of this as a mechanism in real-world elections, at least without a public that is aware of (and wants to overcome) their own biases, and specifically the human susceptibility to Social Desirability Bias.

But for me, myself? I’m aware of, and aspire to overcome, my own biases, and that’s why I use Beeminder. I bind my brain to stop it from ordering the press secretary to issue dumb press releases that make promises I’m not going to carry through on.

The press secretary knows that if he runs his mouth too much his boss will get angry at him for having to put up or pay up on the dumb promises that the press secretary made on his behalf. So he moderates himself, and only promises what he thinks the boss will be willing to follow through on.

That is what Beeminder is good for. Though I’ve just now denied the core doctrine of Beeminder, I really do love Beeminder. It’s just that everyone else is wrong about what Beeminder is for!

Put another way: I have come to think that the people who are wary of Beeminder because they see it as a form of bullying oneself are kind of right. If someone were to say to me something like “I’d like to learn the guitar, but I can never find the time”, what I’d think to myself is “no, you don’t actually want to learn the guitar, not enough to make the time for it.” I wouldn’t say that out loud, because confronting someone like that is rude. And at worst, it may make them go all “I’ll show you” and start practicing the guitar for a bad reason, merely the shame of being called out on their hypocrisy. That would be a waste of their time; letting them be a hypocrite is far better than bullying them into being true to their word. And just like I wouldn’t do that to others, I don’t want to be doing that to myself.

Yet Beeminder is still incredibly useful, even when you take great care not to bully yourself into doing things you don’t want to do. Making a goal, for something you truly want to do, is evidence that you do in fact want to do it (as you’ve put money on the line if you’re wrong about wanting to do it.) And if you turn out to be wrong, you’ll learn that when you keep derailing on it. You’re paying Beeminder in order to keep yourself honest about what you actually want, as opposed to what you merely feel like you want.

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I have no idea if I agree with you, but I love that you put this idea into such a cogent and thorough argument. I’m guessing I’ll be thinking about this one for a while…

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I guess the push back I have right away is that the majority of my goals are for behaviors that I would not be consistent in following without Beeminder. I know this both because I didn’t do these behaviors consistently before starting with Beeminder, and also because I stop being consistent when I pause these goals. But I still want to do them, so I’m not bullying myself. It really is the king wanting to do the thing but not having what it takes to keep with it sans some external structure.

That said, there have definitely been times when my use of Beeminder has forced me to confront my actual priorities in the face of unavoidable constraints on my time, energy, motivation, etc. And that’s definitely been a valuable part of Beeminder for me, too.

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I need to think about this—I think it would be interesting to look through my goals, think about how I engage with each of them, and try to form some kind of coherent picture of what I am getting out of beeminder in each case.

I am also somewhat hesitant to abandon the idea that there is… well, something meaningful that is meant by the “wanting to want” things. Perhaps it is about making things more automatic? You gave the impression in discord that you think you think carefully enough about the consequences of your actions to accurately include them in your feelings of what you want to do, to me at least? Whereas I kind of feel like… yes, if I sit here for 5 minutes and think about how I need to, I dunno, work on job applications rather than procrastinating it because I want to be employed, then I might feel something, but when it’s just an item on the todo list and I don’t consciously think through the consequences of each decision, I still don’t think they’re really reflected at all in how I feel about a task in the moment. Not sure if that’s incoherent, but I’ll post more later anyway.

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Well… to some extent, but I actually tried to make sure to make clear that I don’t fully trust “thinking consciously” as a way to make decisions. I mean, I kind of need to do so, everybody does, but I try to be aware that those decisions will be somewhat tainted by how I want to present to the world, how other people will think of me. (Not to say that being thought well of by others isn’t valuable!)

Even when I act purely on instinct and intuition, that no less reflects my desires, and maybe even more reflects my true desires, as it’s gone through less processing by my social brain modules in my conscious mind. I as a whole am “me”. I’m not just my conscious thoughts.

In the discord you said that you found the phrasing of this as “enlightenment” valuable, so let me continue on with that a moment. I aspire to be, and maybe somewhat manage to be, “enlightened” in the sense of being able to trust my intuitions. Maybe they’re not always right, but neither is conscious reflection. Whenever the two seriously conflict, I try to not let either side just win flat out.

And when I do something, I look back on it after and try to accept that it’s what I wanted at the time, taking into account the costs and benefits. Though it’s true that I may have made a mistake in the—explicit or implicit—calculation, in which case I’ll try to remember that and not make that mistake again. But just because a calculation is implicit, made in my metaphorical gut rather than my conscious brain, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t me that made it.

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Have to admit I’ve been having some trouble digesting your argument. So I loaded it into NotebookLM and asked:

Does this mean that, to zzq, beeminder is not a tool for behavior change? That if I wish to be more consistent with a behavior and use Beeminder to do so, this is a misguided thing to do?

It responded:

No, zzq’s argument doesn’t mean Beeminder isn’t a tool for behavior change. In fact, zzq still sees Beeminder as valuable, but for a different reason than is often assumed. They believe the real power of Beeminder lies in its ability to reveal our true desires and hold us accountable to them, which can ultimately lead to behavior change.

Here’s why:

  • zzq argues against using Beeminder to force ourselves into behaviors we don’t truly want. They believe that setting goals based on what we “should” do or what sounds impressive (like a politician’s campaign promise) can be counterproductive and even harmful.
  • Instead, they see Beeminder as a tool for aligning our actions with our true desires, even if those desires are different from what we initially believe them to be. By putting money on the line, we are forced to confront the reality of our priorities and make choices accordingly.
  • This process of self-discovery and honesty can lead to behavior change. As zzq puts it, Beeminder helps us “keep ourselves honest about what you actually want”. When we have a clearer understanding of our motivations and are held accountable for our choices, we are more likely to make changes that stick.

Therefore, wanting to be more consistent with a behavior and using Beeminder to achieve that isn’t inherently misguided, according to zzq. However, it’s crucial to approach Beeminder with self-awareness and honesty, ensuring that the goals you set truly reflect your genuine desires, not just what you think you should want.

Do you agree with this characterization of your argument?

I guess I’m trying to figure out the ramifications of what you’re saying. Like, do you believe that if I’m not getting enough exercise, I should not use Beeminder to exercise more, because the fact that I’m not exercising enough means I don’t really want to exercise? So I should just accept that fact rather than trying to bully myself into exercising more?

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Yeah, I guess. It’s not quite the way I would have phrased it, but then again, that kind of was the point of the exercise. But I think it grasped the core of what I was saying.

Not at all!

Look, let’s separate the descriptive from prescriptive. Revealed preferences are a purely descriptive theory. I’d say this: putting aside what you may or may not do now or in the future, if you just look back on your past actions, you can and should accept that they reflect what you wanted at the time. Take ownership of your own actions. If you exercised a certain amount and not more or less, an honest look at it would be “all in, taking into account both costs and benefits, that’s the amount of exercise I wanted at the time.”

(To be fair, there is an exception, which is if you were actually incapable of it. If you were chained up in a dungeon cell, it may well be that you wanted to exercise but couldn’t. But if you physically could have exercised on a given day but didn’t, then that was your choice.)

But that’s backwards facing, descriptive. Just because you wanted something then, doesn’t mean you want the same thing now. Either because you know realize that you were wrong back then, or because the facts on the ground have changed.

Maybe you were busy at work, but now that you’re less busy you have more time for exercise (i.e. less opportunity cost.) Maybe you figured out a less uncomfortable way to get in your exercise. Or maybe you recently learned more about how exercise is good for you. Or something. Point is, there are plenty of reasons to change your actions. Just because in the past you preferred a certain amount of exercise, doesn’t mean that you’ll want the same amount going forward.

Here are three categories of reasons why you might plan to exercise more in the future than the past:

  1. You want to exercise more, now that the costs are lower or the benefits are higher than in the past.
  2. You want to exercise more after realizing that you had in the past mistakenly thought the costs where higher than they are, or that the benefits were lower.
  3. You don’t actually want to exercise more, you want to plan to exercise more and then to shirk the execution of the plan. (This gets you the (social) benefits of planning to do it without incurring the costs of actually doing it.)

Beeminder is a useful tool for separating out 1+2 from 3. By putting your money on the line, you figure out if you actually want to exercise more.

If it happens to be that you are in case 3, and you figure that out about yourself, one bad reaction that unfortunately some people react with is to double down on it and force themselves to not be hypocrites and actually stick to the plan. I advise against that. But if you can avoid that failure mode, it is valuable to learn if you are in case 1/2 or in case 3 for any given goal.

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Do you mean those 3 categories to be exhaustive? If so, I think that’s too cynical. I submit:

  1. Your decision-making is distorted when weighing immediate incentives (the couch is very comfy) against long-term incentives (being in shape).

In other words, you genuinely believe yourself to be irrational about exercise. In which case the solution is to better align your incentives. (I quite like that blog post; I think it elegantly generalizes the concept of a commitment device.)

We also have an ancient blog post about how, if the doctrine of revealed preferences is true, the argument defeats itself if someone’s revealed preference is to use Beeminder:

And our very latest blog talks about this as well, discussing how to pick a bare minimum to beemind:

I do agree that it’s bad to beemind Should goals. And that a somewhat-common sentiment of Beeminder users is “i thought i wanted to do XYZ and the derailments i paid for were SO WORTH IT for learning that i don’t in fact want to do XYZ”.

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I didn’t explicitly say that these categories are exhaustive, because I can’t fully back that up. Still: I’ve become a bit skeptical of your proposed 4.

The you-in-the-moment is the real you, no less than the long-term-planner you. Maybe more so—your life is made up of a series of those you-in-the-moments. At the very least you should take seriously into account what the you-in-the-moment wants.

You say I’m overly cynical, but I think that if anything I’m overly idealistic—I’m claiming that you’re not really being irrational, in the sense of having inconsistent preferences, you just have a hard time time seeing the coherent shape of what your preferences are. I’m saying take a closer look at what you actually want, which isn’t what you “want to want”, but something deeper and more important.

Well, yes, I agree, those who use Beeminder have a revealed preference to use Beeminder to do what they are doing. Well, actually you yourself say this in that blog post:

Yes, this, but why isn’t it true even if Beeminder is not yet “sufficiently mainstream” in the population at large? Among those familiar with Beeminder, Beeminder certainly is “sufficiently mainstream”. And revealed preferences (or preferences at all!) aren’t relevant to those who can’t do the thing in question, including those who don’t know it is an option.

So yes: if you know about Beeminder, then the things you do with Beeminder are indeed your choice to do with Beeminder. (And the things you do without Beeminder are your choice to do without Beeminder.) And if you can’t use Beeminder, such as if you don’t know about it (or if e.g. you live in a sanctioned country like Iran or North Korea and can’t access the US dollar payment system, or any other reason), then you can’t use Beeminder, but within what you can do, whatever you choose to do is still (tautologically!) that which you choose to do, i.e. your preference (among the options that are available to you.)

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I love this line of argument!

It resonates very well with one of my conclusions about the use of Beeminder: that it’s great at flushing out what you actually are willing to do.

Our motives and true capabilities aren’t always clear to us (or at least not to me, about me). One thing you can do is essentially make a bet against yourself: for example, a while ago, I “bet” that I really did want to learn to play the piano, by setting up a Beeminder goal to actually do it. And I lost that bet: I derailed enough that I came to learn that no, I just thought I wanted to learn, but I wasn’t actually able to follow through.

It’s not quite @zzq’s option 3, “You don’t actually want to exercise more, you want to plan to exercise more”, but it’s close to that. More “I think I want to exercise more, but I’m actually mistaken about the depth of this desire”.

This is all beautifully in line with Annie Duke’s “Thinking in Bets”, which some of us are going through in the book brigade. She says that you should be prepared to back up your beliefs with bets, which is how you find out how much you really believe them. That’s how I now think of a category of my more speculative goals: I’m betting I actually really do want to do this thing, enough to actually do it, and if I win (don’t derail, or at least not too badly), that’s great! But if I lose (by derailing too often) then I’ve learned something valuable there, too.

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you just have a hard time time seeing the coherent shape of what your preferences are

This is essentially how I view point 4.

  1. Your decision-making is distorted when weighing immediate incentives (the couch is very comfy) against long-term incentives (being in shape).

It’s distorted by multiple factors, and the result is a very vague shape of preferences “in the moment” which causes you to not act in your own best interests

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On further reflection, I think a large part of this is that I’m nowadays broadly suspicious of all claims of irrationality. Not that no one is ever irrational, but it’s too easy to cry “irrationality” to hide what is perfectly rational, just with different aims than what is explicitly expressed.

Here I’m using the world “rational” in it’s purest technical sense, as distinct from merely making mistakes (which we all do all the time, of course.) Irrationality here is intentionally doing something that is opposed to your goals. If while driving you reach a fork in the road, and can get to your destination by turning either left or right, and you know that the road on the right gets you there quicker, and you want to get there as fast as possible, but you turn left—then that’s irrational. If you turn right that’s rational, even if there ends up being an unusual traffic jam that makes the right route take longer than the left route counterfactually would have.

If someone does turn left while knowing that turning right is quicker, what should we suppose? That they are irrational, or that they don’t actually want to get to their destination as quickly as possible? Maybe they enjoy taking the scenic route.

Let’s not be Straw Vulcans who say that taking the scenic route is ipso facto irrational. Rationality isn’t a values claim; enjoying the scenery is not an “irrational” thing to value. You need to decide for yourself if this trip is one in which you prefer quickly getting to your destination or enjoying the ride.

Not that irrationality can’t exist! But if someone does turn left, even if you’d have turned right if you were in their place, that really doesn’t mean they are irrational. Maybe they just have different preferences or values than you do. (Or maybe they are making a mistake: maybe you know something they don’t about the routes. Or else maybe you’re the one making a mistake, and they know something you don’t.)

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Why is it bad to beemind “Should” goals ?

and how to differentiate between Should and Want goals ?

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My 2 cents:

I think overall the ideas in this initial premise of this thread are a bit off the mark.

I think there are a lot of situations where life is more complex than “oh you aren’t doing the thing so therefore you don’t actually want to do it”.

Some random sparks of ideas:

  1. It’s not only about wanting the result, it’s also about a proper balance between wanting the process AND wanting the result.

If you only want the result, ex: you want a perfect body, but you don’t want to exercise, and you do love eating unhealthy junk food, then you only want the result, and not the process. An example I like to think of is go to a bar and ask drunk people “do you want to be a billionaire?”. Everyone would say yes. However, none of them actually want to undergo the process of creating 1 billion dollars of value for a market. So, they are open to the desirable outcome magically appearing to them, but not actually making the process a daily habit.

On the other hand, it is often recommended to be “process-oriented”. However, there is also a pitfall here of getting sucked into a process, and losing the big picture. For instance, if you want to get to a high ELO in chess, you could set a process oriented goal of doing 30 min of chess puzzles everyday. However, if all you do is chess puzzles, and never play a single game, you won’t ever get to that super high ELO. Perhaps you love the process of grinding chess puzzles, but you aren’t REALLY thinking about the milestone of 1800 ELO. You got lost in a process rabbit hole that is enjoyable to you.

That’s why I advocate a balance is needed. You must have “grinding-the-process” habits, and beeminder is massively helpful with these. You also need to want a result, and let go of resistance and self-sabotage towards achieving definitive outcome milestones. There are definitely some beeminders you could create to have a meta-result habit as well. One idea there might be to have a daily question you have to answer like “what is the main bottleneck holding me back from getting closer to the result today? How can I get that progressing?”

  1. Our minds have layers within them and conflicting desires/beliefs. Addictions exist. Coping mechanisms/behaviors as well. If someone has an addiction, then even if they truly want to be better, it can be challenging since the pull of the addiction pulls them away from what they want, and messes with brain chemistry. A lot of times working through these things in the initial stages involves setting up systems to trick the mind into not engaging in the addictive behavior. Then, over time will power can build up, as well as subconscious identity and belief change, that the addictive behavior no longer seems appealing.

Commitment devices like beeminder can truly help with this. And let me tell you, to say that someone facing an addiction “doesn’t actually want to quit” is a very wrong thing to say. If you study the psychology of addiction, you can quickly learn that it’s not as simple as just wanting to change, as environment, peer group, psychological dependence all have a lot to do with it.

  1. A lot of neuroscience is based on the evolution of the brain, and the fact that our brain contains multiple evolving brain systems due to the long process of evolution we have undergone as the most neurologically advanced species… This may relate to what you said about the “press secretary” in our brains. Neuroscience says we have a “Reptile Brain”, a “Mammalian Brain” or the limbic system, and then the “Conscious Brain” or executive system. The desires between these 3 brain systems can conflict. For instance, you might go on a 7 day fast for social status in a certain community, which is using mammalian brain (social drive) to outprioritize the Reptile brain.

To me, I think this perspective shows the value of commitment devices, when your reptile brain or mammalian brain is in the driver’s seat, the loss aversion of a beeminder can get you to still prioritize the good habit.

Final Thoughts:
So, in summary, I could go on with more sparks, but I do think @zzq 's ideas sound more personal to the types of goals they set, and their personal experience with beeminder, but there are many other angles/perspectives that show why a commitment device is useful to stick to various types of goals.

I’d also like to say that I think having goals is valuable. Without goals/missions we tend to feel lost. We need missions and higher values to pursue in our lives, to feel fulfilled and have meaning. For everyone the missions and values will be different, but it is the challenge to adhere to them that gives satisfication, accomplishment, and a sense that you are growing into a more developed being !

One other thing to think is that some people want to be bullied into proper behavior (ie respond well to authority). Jail/Prison exist for a reason as do fines, and all of these are very much the system bullying you for “improper behavior”. A commitment contract that you engage in with the laws of the state you live in…

Sometimes if you’ve tried being gentle on yourself for years, bullying is a good option to take, even if it’s just for a season of your life.

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The thing you’re missing is net vs gross preferences. Here I’m talking only about net preferences. But yes, there is a big difference in how it feels between not caring much one way or the other about something and really caring both ways in a big internal conflict in which one side maybe only barely wins out, even if they both have the same net result.

Somebody who is addicted but wants to quit, to use your example, might really really want to quit, and also really really want another hit, and those almost but not quite balance out, so that in net he wants to quit, but “struggles with it” in the sense that the desire to quit is very very strong, which it must be if it is to get anywhere near strong enough to balance out his addictive desire.

Also, I think you’re missing the fact that brain chemistry is nothing special. Brain chemistry is all we are. Every single desire is brain chemistry. There is no “soul”, no “true self” above the mere matter we are made out of. Take that seriously. It’s hard! Humans have a strong instinctive feeling of dualism, but it’s flat-out incorrect.

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You might be interested in Will McWhinney’s work on Paths of Change. Or you might hate it. It opens the door to there necessarily being multiple valid ‘rationalities’, and a basis for each.

My recollection is that, for a permanent change to happen in one of McWhinney’s identified realities, it must be adjusted from a viewpoint from another of the realities.

Not unlike the Einstein/Kernighan view that problems need to be solved at a different level than that which created them.

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Apologies in advance for what I’m about to say. @zzq, I believe everything you’ve expressed in this thread has been in good faith. And, as I said previously, your ideas are intriguing and I’m interested to continue considering where my own beliefs and opinions may be wrong.

However, I think I should express a perspective that so far has only been alluded to.

I think there are more reasons than what you’ve stated that put this idea in danger of being quite upsetting and/or offensive.

  1. It asserts that you know my internal state better than I do.
  2. It shuts down the possibility of further dialogue. If you believe you know my internal state better than I do, then there isn’t much point to me sharing anything further with you.
  3. It puts me at risk moral judgement. If you believe that X has a moral or ethical component, and I don’t behave in a way that corresponds with your moral assessment, you will conclude that my true self is at odds with your sense of morality. And you have already ruled out the possibility of the obvious defense–that I agree with your moral assessment, but have failed in execution.

At its worst, the line of reasoning expressed in the quotation above can easily become judgmental, exclusionary, and ableist in some pretty ugly ways.

These are not hypothetical concerns for me. As a person with ADHD, I have had people close to me claim to know my internal state better than I do, dismiss me when I try to explain my internal state, and then pass moral judgement on me based on their belief that I simply do not wish to fix my problems or live up to their standards.

For people who have had such experiences, there are very real reasons we may find ourself offended or triggered by such ideas.

Again, I want to be clear that I don’t intend to state any of this is true of you specifically, @zzq. I only wanted to share why you may expect to receive strong push back on such ideas beyond it simply being rude to express.

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I get what you’re saying; though if I had to sum those three points up in one word, the word I’d use is “rude”, which is indeed the word I used. Yes, it is rude to assert that you know someone’s mental state better than they do (though of course, in the abstract, in one case or another it may or may not be true.) And yes, it is rude to pronounce moral judgement on a conversation partner, especially in a way that shuts down the possibility of continued dialogue.

So I kind of feel like I actually said all this, just summed up in one word (“rude”) because it’s not my primary point, and anyway I assume people get why saying such things is considered inappropriate. But above and beyond all these reasons not to say such a thing, you also (obviously) shouldn’t bully people into doing things, even things they say they want.

And, at the end of the day, the main point of this was to help build the intuition about why not to act this way. Not towards others (of course), but also not towards yourself. I agree with you! That would be an offensive, indeed rude, thing to say to someone. But consider also that some of those reasons apply also if you’re saying it to yourself. That was the point I was trying to convey.

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This feels too short of a reply but I think it actually isn’t.

Things mean what we ascribe them to mean.

On 2023-03-19 I created a step goal because I wanted to want it, not because I wanted to put one foot in front of the other 10,000 times a day. I had to go look to see if I even still had the goal active because it’s been so long since I derailed on it (i’ve had it active and de-activated a few times since then, but it is currently active).

Through beeminder assisted forced execution of the “press secretary’s wishes”, I found that I actually had wanted a lot of the associated benefits of this one foot in front of the other activity. I would have never wanted it, but some of the gifts and rewards of change come only through the change - so wanting to want might be enough if coupled with real rewards from doing.

If beeminder works for a person, by any mechanistic theory or meaning that you give it, praise be to the bee, I’d say. Do what works.

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No, see, you do want to take those steps. I can tell, because you do so. Revealed preferences!

Seriously though, what I’m trying to do here is give a different perspective on Beeminder, one that I think clarifies some things. I worded it in a strongly, even provocatively, because the best way to explore ideas is in their fullest version, without watering them down by hedging too much. But I do think that I’ve captured here something essential and important, that fully endorses the good uses of Beeminder (including what you describe), while warning about some less good uses.

If each day you found yourself conflicted over needing to take a bunch more steps or else you’d be charged, and doing so grudgingly while resenting your former self who set up the goal, I’d say you should maybe rethink things—that’s the kind of goal I’m opposing here. But if you find yourself reminded by the goal to achieve things you want to achieve, if as you take those additional steps you can reflect on why you wanted to take more steps and feel good about the goal as a whole in the long term, then that’s a great Beeminder goal.

It’s worthwhile to pay attention to that distinction. From your full-throated defense of your steps goal, I’m sure it’s in the second category. That’s what I mean when I say that you do in fact want to take those steps, in the fullest meaning of what you want to do, the synthesis of long term wants and short term wants. I think you can synthesize the two types of want, in fact you can’t not do so, though I realize that’s a controversial statement.

So yes, do what works! I fully endorse you sticking to your goal that you obviously want. In fact, I equate you wanting it and it working for you!

Maybe that’s the sticking point. I’m using the word “want” in the most global zoomed-out sense. Not some narrow-minded desire-in-the-moment, but rather that which the abstract you-overall wants, taking into account absolutely everything, long-term and short-term, with the long term being some sort of integral over all the short-terms to come.

I think that this is a very natural use of the word “want”, or at least there needs to be some word that describes this, because it’s pretty important—indeed, the most important thing! This is what you’re implicitly trying to maximize, your utility function (if you obey the VNM axioms, at least.)

It’s a bit of a semantic debate over whether you “really wanted” to take those steps. I say you do, because that’s what works for you as a holistic person. You’re not, in this case, issuing a press release claiming that you want something you don’t really want, you’re not forcing yourself to do it over your own objections—here you find yourself aligned. And Beeminder helped you discover that. You created the goal because you really wanted (in the expansive definition of “wanted”) to take those steps. Your Beeminder goals (at least those that you don’t derail on a lot and then abandon) are the things that you really truly want to do—otherwise you wouldn’t have made them and stuck to them. The press release about wanting to take all those steps was true—it’s certainly not the case that all press releases are false!

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