Have you considered reframing this as positive reinforcement instead of negative? It may require more trust in the system, but one example would be to have the user set aside a larger amount of money (in "escrow") that is paid out over time after successful completions of the kommitment.
This sounds good but we’re not into it. I mean, first, we do have plenty of positive reinforcement in the form of pretty graphs and the satisfaction of adding datapoints. You can even spin the pledges as positive — they help you quantify the value of your goals. That can be powerful information for us rationality nerds.
But why not reframe Beeminder to focus on rewards? Well, paying money up front and getting it back unless you derail is a trick — it’s equivalent to getting stung. At least for me personally, the equivalency would always be at the back of my mind and bother me.
And there are more pragmatic problems. I like having scary high pledges on some of my goals. It would feel especially unreasonable to pay up front on those. Even more pragmatically, most goals are open-ended: get 10k steps (or work 40 hours, or practice piano for half an hour or whatever) per day forever. There’s typically no particular point when it makes sense to get your money back. It would be totally inefficient to have money always flowing back and forth and would really muddy the mental accounting in terms of how much you’re paying Beeminder for the motivation it’s giving you.
Not to mention the laws and accounting involved. We’d be kind of a bank and have revenue that wouldn’t count as revenue. I assume this part would be perfectly overcomeable if we were convinced the psychology / behavioral economics were right. But, again, we are not.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have thought about using positive reinforcement, and I am still considering it as possible future feature. One of the reasons I chose to start with negative reinforcement is that I had read in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" that losses tended to be more motivating. I think there are arguments about whether that holds up or not, but I think it's true of my own experiences.
Setting money aside in escrow is definitely an interesting idea, but as you say, requires quite a lot of trust. I did toy with idea of rewarding people with the punishment money from other failed commitments but it'd be quite tricky to make the rewards worthwhile, while making sure the system doesn't get gamed.
Would you be more likely to use something like the escrow system described above? Or is there an alternative mechanism that you'd be more interested in?
I've always felt like there should be a way to connect experienced software developers with research groups- something like this, for example, should have been never happened with code review.
For example, one could imagine a program that connects developers with with research groups to help develop good code, or with conferences to test submitted code.
Does anyone know if there already exists a program like that?
there is an organization called Software Carpentry that is basically like this.
however, the real problem has more to do with incentives and funding than it does knowledge of software best practices. right now, if you take the time to write thoroughly-tested clean good code, all you're doing is handicapping your research career against people who can churn out papers faster than you. you can see this because code from computer science departments is nearly as bad as in other fields, even from students who have had real industry jobs and learned how to do the right thing.
it does seem like in this case, though, because the scripts were actually intended as a tool to be used by others, the investment in more careful testing might have been warranted.
It's called an internship (for graduate students), but you're right that it should go the other way too but you'd run into a lot of money, IP, and institutional politics issues. Occasionally there are older industry people who work as staff scientists who get paid little and support the research effort in some capacity, usually IT. The biggest reasons why it doesn't happen as often are because in many cases, people who become professors have never done anything in industry, don't care unless funding is part of the conversation, or aren't motivated to have artifacts be reproducible. Their research group is a fiefdom over which they wield control, so unless they want to start a company on the side, they don't care about your programming skills and they don't like to give up any control.
A lot of the code used in research is hosted on Github and open for contributions. That would be an easy way to make an impact.
Uni Zürich also has a group that tries to connect non-academics with researchers. The focus goes both ways, but it could be something to look into if you're good with code and want to assist in some way.
Something like this is sorely needed because we are abstracting away layers of implementation details and quirks from the users of computational software. They are in fact abstracted away so much that a doubt that the author might have about the correctness of the software is almost never brought up in a research paper. It is just assumed that whoever wrote the software did their due diligence. You often don't see their code, and even if you do, it is incomplete or impossible to run because while the publication is designed to allow the reader to replicate the study, the same doesn't necessarily apply to the computational component that crunched the numbers to reach the conclusion of the paper.
Did you read the article? The claim is that focusing on driver and pedestrian distraction is beside the point:
“All this talk about pedestrian distraction, driver distraction? It’s such a distraction,” says Ben Welle of the World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities. “It puts all the responsibility on individuals, and none on the environment they operate in.”
If you don't mind me asking, what did your startup to achieve an exit? Curious, since you're arguing that AI outdoing one radiologist but not an ensemble of radiologists does not create sufficient business value.
This seems like a great idea in theory- potentially better than the so-called luxury ETFs that only invest in what the fund manager deems as socially-responsible companies. If your expense ratios are low, and you allow me to have a meaningful say in how I or the fund as a whole votes for better climate outcomes, I would be personally interested.
I'd love see how you guys do it, and will be following your progress.
One question I've really been wanting answered is- how do I even know my tips are going to the workers? In the worst case, the tips are going straight to the owner.
This is why I typically tip with cash only, and view these credit card-based counter service tips as a form of price segmentation, where I can pay more if I want to support the business.
