The Nonlinear Library LW - My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia by William Howard
Apr 16, 2024
26:36
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia, published by William Howard on April 16, 2024 on LessWrong.
About a year ago I decided to try using one of those apps where you tie your goals to some kind of financial penalty. The specific one I tried is Forfeit, which I liked the look of because it's relatively simple, you set single tasks which you have to verify you have completed with a photo.
I'm generally pretty sceptical of productivity systems, tools for thought, mindset shifts, life hacks and so on. But this one I have found to be really shockingly effective, it has been about the biggest positive change to my life that I can remember. I feel like the category of things which benefit from careful planning and execution over time has completely opened up to me, whereas previously things like this would be largely down to the luck of being in the right mood for long enough.
It's too soon to tell whether the effect will fade out eventually, but I have been doing this for ~10 months now[1] so I think I'm past the stage of being excited by a new system and can in good conscience recommend this kind of commitment mechanism as a way of overcoming akrasia.
The rest of this post consists of some thoughts on what I think makes a good akrasia-overcoming approach in general, having now found one that works (see hindsight bias), and then advice on how to use this specific app effectively. This is aimed as a ~personal reflections post~ rather than a fact post.
Thoughts on what makes a good anti-akrasia approach
I don't want to lean too much on first principles arguments for what should work and what shouldn't, because I was myself surprised by how well setting medium sized financial penalties worked for me. I think it's worth explaining some of my thinking though, because the advice in the next section probably won't work as well for you if you think very differently.
1. Behaviour change ("habit formation") depends on punishment and reward, in addition to repetition
A lot of advice about forming habits focuses on the repetition aspect, I think positive and negative feedback is much more important.
One way to see this is to think of all the various admin things that you put off or have to really remind yourself to do, like taking the bins out. Probably you have done these hundreds or thousands of times in your life, many more times than any advice would recommend for forming a habit. But they are boring or unpleasant every time so you have to layer other stuff (like reminders) on top to make yourself actually do them.
Equally you can take heroin once or twice, and after that you won't need any reminder to take it.
I tend to think a fairly naively applied version of the ideas from operant conditioning is correct when it comes to changing behaviour. When a certain behaviour has a good outcome, relative to what the outcome otherwise would have been, you will want to do it more. When it has a bad outcome you will want to do it less.
This is a fairly lawyerly way of saying it to include for example doing something quite aversive to avoid something very aversive; or doing something that feels bad but has some positive identity-affirming connotation for you (like working out). Often though it just boils down to whether you feel good or bad while doing it.
The way repetition fits into this is that more examples of positive (negative) outcomes is more evidence that something is good (bad), and so repetition reinforces (or anti-reinforces) the behaviour more strongly but doesn't change the sign.
A forwards-looking consequence of this framing is that by repeating an action that feels bad you are actually anti-reinforcing it, incurring a debt that will make it more and more aversive until you stop doing it. A backwards-looking consequence is that if the prospect of doing...
About a year ago I decided to try using one of those apps where you tie your goals to some kind of financial penalty. The specific one I tried is Forfeit, which I liked the look of because it's relatively simple, you set single tasks which you have to verify you have completed with a photo.
I'm generally pretty sceptical of productivity systems, tools for thought, mindset shifts, life hacks and so on. But this one I have found to be really shockingly effective, it has been about the biggest positive change to my life that I can remember. I feel like the category of things which benefit from careful planning and execution over time has completely opened up to me, whereas previously things like this would be largely down to the luck of being in the right mood for long enough.
It's too soon to tell whether the effect will fade out eventually, but I have been doing this for ~10 months now[1] so I think I'm past the stage of being excited by a new system and can in good conscience recommend this kind of commitment mechanism as a way of overcoming akrasia.
The rest of this post consists of some thoughts on what I think makes a good akrasia-overcoming approach in general, having now found one that works (see hindsight bias), and then advice on how to use this specific app effectively. This is aimed as a ~personal reflections post~ rather than a fact post.
Thoughts on what makes a good anti-akrasia approach
I don't want to lean too much on first principles arguments for what should work and what shouldn't, because I was myself surprised by how well setting medium sized financial penalties worked for me. I think it's worth explaining some of my thinking though, because the advice in the next section probably won't work as well for you if you think very differently.
1. Behaviour change ("habit formation") depends on punishment and reward, in addition to repetition
A lot of advice about forming habits focuses on the repetition aspect, I think positive and negative feedback is much more important.
One way to see this is to think of all the various admin things that you put off or have to really remind yourself to do, like taking the bins out. Probably you have done these hundreds or thousands of times in your life, many more times than any advice would recommend for forming a habit. But they are boring or unpleasant every time so you have to layer other stuff (like reminders) on top to make yourself actually do them.
Equally you can take heroin once or twice, and after that you won't need any reminder to take it.
I tend to think a fairly naively applied version of the ideas from operant conditioning is correct when it comes to changing behaviour. When a certain behaviour has a good outcome, relative to what the outcome otherwise would have been, you will want to do it more. When it has a bad outcome you will want to do it less.
This is a fairly lawyerly way of saying it to include for example doing something quite aversive to avoid something very aversive; or doing something that feels bad but has some positive identity-affirming connotation for you (like working out). Often though it just boils down to whether you feel good or bad while doing it.
The way repetition fits into this is that more examples of positive (negative) outcomes is more evidence that something is good (bad), and so repetition reinforces (or anti-reinforces) the behaviour more strongly but doesn't change the sign.
A forwards-looking consequence of this framing is that by repeating an action that feels bad you are actually anti-reinforcing it, incurring a debt that will make it more and more aversive until you stop doing it. A backwards-looking consequence is that if the prospect of doing...