How a pathological procrastinor can lose weight [Anti-akrasia]

[-]CronoDAS16y90

Perhaps oddly, being threatened with a large negative consequence for inaction makes me even more paralyzed. I begin to act as though the negative consequence is inevitable, and just sit and sulk instead of taking action to avert the negative consequence. Instead of procrastinating and then making a heroic effort, I usually procrastinate until I decide that it's already too late, and give up completely.

"Carrot and stick" motivation simply doesn't work on me most of the time: I find myself not caring if I don't get the carrot and simply endure the the stick, suffering in silence.

[-]pjeby16y90

Perhaps oddly, being threatened with a large negative consequence for inaction makes me even more paralyzed.

That's not odd at all; it's what I consider the normal definition of "pathological procrastinator".

People who find this sort of forfeiture arrangement motivating are probably not pathological procrastinators, the way poor people in wealthy nations aren't all that poor compared to relatively-well off people in poor countries. Doesn't mean they don't suffer from their problems, just that they're really not in the same class of hurt.

[-]mytyde13y-10

Your claim that poor people in rich countries suffer less from poverty is fallacious and insensitive. Statistical information shows that standard of living (and about every other imaginable method of judging well-being) is tied to relative wealth rather than absolute wealth.

[-]jimrandomh16y60

How do you know that people won't lie about their weight in order to win bets? How do we know that you'll pay people who win their bets?

[-]dreeves16y20

Great questions. It's just honor system for now. That's not necessarily crazy though. I mean, why do people on ebay actually send the goods after they get paid?

[-]Alicorn16y50

People on eBay who don't send the goods get negative feedback, which influences their ability to make future deals. Even that doesn't always stop thieves; a family friend once bought an iPod on eBay and was sent a padded envelope full of crumpled newspaper. (Then he went on court TV to get his money back from the scammer, but that is another story.)

[-]dreeves16y00

Good point, though ebay still succeeds in the sense of providing a valuable service despite the fraud. Kibotzer should probably always remain community oriented -- perhaps an existing user has to recruit you and vouch for you (and for Kibotzer) before the bet starts.

Right now I'm just focused on the value of a service like this, assuming away the trust/fraud issues. I'm confident those are ultimately solvable. People are mostly pretty decent, in my experience.

By the way, thanks everyone for all the feedback! The comments would also be a great place for pointers to other anti-akrasia tools. I mentioned stickk.com already. Are there others? Anti-akrasia can be interpreted more broadly than "create new carrots and sticks".

[-]Lawliet16y00

I would upvote this because it's important that you answered the question and I don't want to discourage that, but I don't want to imply that I like your honor system solution.

[-]Emile16y40

Wouldn't it work just as well if instead of money, you used "reputation" in the form of a public profile?

I wouldn't be surprised if group pressure was more motivating than money, and it also lowers the barriers of entry so you get more people in. Plus it avoids all the legal and fraud issues.

[-]dreeves16y10

Yes, to a degree, and that's why we have that (opt-in) public gallery on kibotzer.com. But if you (probably rightly) suspect that your friends have stopped paying attention to your graph, then it's easy to fall off the wagon. Speaking from experience. :) The wager idea also has an aspect that's hard to capture with shame (powerful as that is), namely the anti-procrastination aspect. You can dig yourself in quite a hole thinking you'll catch up soon and undo the (only gradually building) shame.

[-]Emile16y70

But if you (probably rightly) suspect that your friends have stopped paying attention to your graph, then it's easy to fall off the wagon.

Have a sidebar with "today's LOSERS"

Instead of money, have users give a list of email contacts. If the user fails, all of the contacts get spammed with a failure message written by the user when he starts (the contacts don't get spammed when the user starts or succeeds, so he can keep the list big).

[-]toner16y40

Surely this is illegal in the US. First you're acting like a bank by taking deposits and paying interest, and probably you have to actually be a bank to do that; second you're setting yourself up as a bookmaker.

[-]dreeves16y10

This may be mostly an issue of terminology. Treat the upfront payment as a fee for the service and then there's a contest with prizes. It's not gambling for the same reason it's not gambling when you pay an entry fee for a race with cash prizes.

[-]jimrandomh16y50

Laws and regulations do not care what terminology you use, and many countries have extensive regulations on gambling and gambling web sites. If a technicality caused your site to be misclassified as gambling, then that would be the end of your site. And if you don't have a limited liability corporate shield around the site, it would also be the end of your personal finances. Unless you're really certain that you know what you're doing, you should consult a lawyer before proceeding.

[-]pjeby16y50

The magic word here is "escrow". This is an escrow service, not betting or a bank. Alternatively, it might be considered a bonding service. Either way, though, it definitely needs competent legal advice and appropriate licensing for the jurisdictions you operate it in.

[-]PhilGoetz16y30

Seems to me that, after so much worrying over whether we can have any real-world impact, this should be upvoted more.

[-]Daniel_Burfoot16y20

This is a great tool. One of my goals is to simplify my life by using checklists, schedules, software and other tools to avoid quotidian decision making.

The problem is that many important goals are not easily quantifiable; the partial solution is to reformulate goals in such a way as to admit quantification.

For example, if you want a quantifiable way to improve your math skills, download a formal proof checker and prove the 100 theorems listed here (or find an easier set). Another interesting possibility would be to create a wiki of canonical hard programming problems (e.g write a Lisp interpreter) along with test suites to determine if an implementation is correct. Then you can quantify your progress on the route to hacker nirvana by counting the number of hard problems you've solved. When you've solved all the problems in one language, start over with a new one.

[-]freyley16y10

Project Euler is a start on your last request.

[-][anonymous]16y00

I'm improving my maths by running through the exercises here

[-]mstirner16y10

I like this idea. I would guess a big part of what is making it work for your users is simply the data entry.

This reminds me of something else that I thought is pretty good for combating exercise procrastination also. A little over a month ago I started the "100-day burpee challenge", where you do one burpee (it's an exercise; examples are on Youtube) on the first day, two on the second, until day 100. The important features of this for procrastinators are that it is very cheap to start—you just have to do one burpee—and that at any particular point it is not much more work than you've done before, and at the end you are doing a fair amount of exercise daily.

This will only work if you are the kind of person who can be motivated by the psychological cost of having failed, but still tend to procrastinate. I think that applies to a lot of people though; when I procrastinate, it is usually in part because of risk of failure.

[-]Richard_Kennaway16y10

I like this.

I wonder if it would work for people to have the software on their own computer, just as a way for them to keep score? Bringing the far near, but without the machinery of betting.

*cough* I came across a program some years ago for, one might say, a related purpose, although entirely different in its workings. A "virtual master" for people into BDSM. I will not post the link here, but if anyone seriously would like the URL and understands the sort of material they are likely to read there, let me know and I'll send it privately.

[-]Jeremy16y00

Why is it that some of the graphs on the Kibotzer home page have 30 or more points off of the yellow brick road? In fact, some of the graphs don't even have a yellow brick road that I can see. Are you still working out the kinks with the software?

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about http://kibotzer.com/jud-resistance/ http://kibotzer.com/dskate/ http://kibotzer.com/jill/

In any case, I think this is a nice idea. I'm a long-time user of Stickk for my anti-akrasia needs, but I'll definitely give this a shot if everything is working properly.

[-]dreeves16y00

Yeah, those people (one of them is me) failed to stay on their yellow brick roads but kept reporting anyway, trying to catch up. The current system doesn't prevent that even though it misses the whole anti-akrasia point as I outlined it in this post.

Thanks so much, everyone, for this awesome feedback, as well as the huge influx of kibotzer applications (with some really creative goals). Sorry we're taking so long to work through the wait-list!

[-]taw16y-10

If you are a pathological procrastinator you're pretty screwed when it comes to weight loss. You have this monumental goal like "lose 20 pounds" but there's no "last minute" that you can put it off until.

No you're not. There are perfectly valid solutions like drugs (especially ECA), and for harder cases surgery. Or just talk to some bodybuilders for they know that stuff - and the very fact that you're talking about "weight loss" as opposed to "fat loss" and consider body weight a good indicator of progress shows that you're not thinking about it right.

[-]dreeves16y50

Interesting that you mention surgery.
I believe that much of the benefit of stomach surgery can be achieved without the actual surgery. The surgery costs on the order of $20,000 and is typically not covered by insurance -- people are actually coughing up those amounts. What it accomplishes is to make you feel physically ill when you eat too much. That's all. There's no other magic going on. It just makes you eat less.
Or, more specifically, makes you want to eat less, since otherwise you'll be nauseated. So, what if you put the $20,000 in escrow and had a yellow brick road to follow such that if you ever went off the road, even for just a day, the $20,000 would be gone? You would first starve yourself for a while to make sure you were safely below the road. Then you would be cautious for a while. If you ever got close to the edge of the road then you'd really be nervous. That piece of pie would not look so appetizing. It could possibly be enough to put you over the edge. It might be a $20k piece of pie. You would really not want to eat it.

Finally, to respond to your point about weight loss vs fat loss, we don't disagree, just that if you're well outside your ideal weight range then scale weight is a perfectly good proxy for what you really care about and has the advantage of being much simpler to measure.

[-]taw16y30

I never done surgery, I just know all papers show it's by a huge margin the most effective way of long term weight loss without least rebouncing of all. It beats all drug and diet based solutions ever tested by a huge margin. So diet would be no substitute for it. But I don't know anything more than pubmed and Wikipedia now, so I will shut up about it.

What I do know is that scale weight is a horrible proxy during dieting, because there are so many trivial ways to make very good progress by losing water (in so many different ways), and by losing muscles with any kind of shitty diet with serious calorie restriction. Actual fat lose only happens very slowly, and it's even possible to lose a lot of fat while on calorie deficit and building up weight - muscles are mostly water, so their scale weight per calorie is very high compared to fat.

I would even risk the suggestion that it's one of the main reasons why dieting fails - people still use this unbelievably wrong proxy to track their progress. Unfortunately body fat % as returned by cheap resistance based meters is extremely unreliable too. I found navel circumference to be the best free method - fat gets reduced equally over entire body, and navel is where there's a lot of fat, and very little muscle or anything else there, so changes in navel circumference are very good indicator of progress. But that's just a personal benchmark.

[-]dreeves16y20

all papers show it's [surgery] by a huge margin the most effective way of long term weight loss

I don't have any evidence yet, but I claim that we can engineer a better way.

Thanks for the points about the problems with scale weight and the sensible alternative of navel circumference. I do think, though, that scale weight is not a crazy proxy, with some precautions (such as gradual loss). After all, if you're far from your bodyfat goal (and you're not a bodybuilder) then you know with certainty that the scale will say a smaller number when you're done. What I tell people is to first "kibotz" down to an upper bound on their ideal weight and then switch to a better metric.

In any case, Kibotzer is largely metric-agnostic.

[-]taw16y00

You will have significant amount of muscles that you might loss even if you don't have anything to do with bodybuilding. Most seriously restricted diets put you on insufficient proteins (if you scale everything by the same %, you have insufficient proteins, and vitamins etc.), plus there's no reserve storage mechanism like with carbs and fats so you cannot just average them weekly, so your muscles are the only reserve source your body can use. So you will lose a lot of muscle, and all associated water, what will result in much faster weight loss than just losing fat on responsible diet.

The main difference is that normal people will rebounce back to normal amount of muscle, regaining all the water too etc. (that's part but not all of the whole after-diet rebounce) Bodybuilders cannot really do that, as they have much more muscles than they're supposed to.

Anyway if kibotzer works for you, go for it. I'm just guessing it won't work for most people, for the same reasons mainstream dieting doesn't.

[-]dreeves16y00

My "unless you're a bodybuilder" caveat was just to point out that if you have, say, over a third bodyfat then you surely want your scale weight to go down as a side effect of losing the bodyfat, unless you also want to add massive amounts of muscle.

But we do mostly agree about the physiology and you definitely should add muscle as part of "weight loss". Muscle pretty much burns calories just sitting there, so it's a huge help. I definitely recommend some weight training as part of any fitness plan. Losing weight by just eating less can often be a death spiral where you have to keep eating less and less as your metabolism adapts to the fewer calories. The human body is impressively adept at maintaining its weight. Another thing I recommend is having occasional flat spots on your "yellow brick road". If it's hard to keep from gaining, let alone losing, then you're doing it wrong.

I guess we're getting far afield from the anti-akrasia aspects though. Again, kibotzer is agnostic about what metric you use to measure your progress, though the simpler it is to measure the better. (And we've put thought into the case of scale weight as a metric, figuring out how to adjust for random fluctuations and how to avoid losing weight the wrong way, like you're talking about.)

So I think we agree, "seriously restricted diets" are bad news and muscle gain should be part of any "weight loss" plan. But for most people that still means a gradually decreasing scale weight so I stand by it as a useful metric.

[+]Askania13y-80

LESSWRONG
Petrov Day
LW

LESSWRONG
Petrov Day
LW

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How a pathological procrastinor can lose weight [Anti-akrasia]

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