Here’s my top-level reply to the Slate Star Codex post:
Love this (as always) and just want to cast my vote to review Carol Dweck’s book next: http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck/dp/0345472322
So far I’m on her side in the Baumeister vs Dweck debate, so I’m eager to hear what’s behind that “if Dweck were an oncologist” jab (or maybe it was entirely good-natured).
To argue against your million-dollar analogy: With physical endurance you approach a physical limit asymptotically. The feeling that you can always eke out more with the right inducement is an illusion. Eventually one more straw will in fact break a camel’s back. As for willpower… With the right inducement (say, continued employment) you can exert superhuman willpower, like waking up early and going to work every day for years or decades. Which is to say that with the right incentives, willpower doesn’t even need to be invoked. So maybe I’m saying that it doesn’t matter if willpower is unlimited, you can route around it and find creative ways to induce yourself to do what you really want to do.
Dammit, I degenerated immediately to pitching Beeminder again!
But to finish the thought, as I’ve argued in the comments above, the best way to use Beeminder, at least initially, is not to probe the hard limits of willpower but to fix egregious instances of akrasia — to do a bit more than the bupkes you’d do if left to your own devices. You can then gradually dial up the steepness of your graph, but certainly stop doing that before feeling overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.
In other words, make a measurable improvement well below the point that the limits of willpower are even a question (if you don’t think of it as routing around willpower altogether). Some people — like the productivity-ueber-alles types who try polyphasic sleep and whatnot — thrive on adding stress and Beeminder can accommodate that. But using it in moderation can reduce stress, like by getting you to spread your studying out over a semester instead of cramming for exams, or by making you pay attention to your fitbit just enough to actually get in 10k steps a day, or getting yourself to bed on time instead of repeatedly getting in “one more point” in a comment thread till 2am.