dreeves
commented
2 years ago Beemail:
I've seen this opinion expressed more than once in the rationality community. There's Nate Soares's Replacing Guilt series, which doesn't argue against Beeminder in particular but seems generally opposed to our approach. More recently I found this podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2WboxPG9rbp0DHfkRq4pkk
Using terms like "self-coercion" sure make Beeminder sound bad but I just can't get my head around what the alternative is. It's always this hand-wavy "get the different parts of yourself in alignment!" but I don't see where the rubber meets the road on that.
We've been having a great discussion of this in the Discord but all of it is (incredibly heart-warming) defense of Beeminder. I'd like to blog about this and I think to really nail it I need to be able to pass an ideological Turning test for the anti-Beeminder position.
Ideas solicited! If you don't have any then I'm liable to conclude that the "let your sub-selves live in harmony" school of thought is ultimately empty platitudes!
https://blog.beeminder.com/blackmail
DALL-E 2 image:
<img width="450px" alt="Bee self-flagellating" title="Hello DALL-E" src="https://blog.beeminder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/dall-e-bee-self-flagellate.png"/>
Image from autonomous image-generating agent created by Danny and Bee:
<img width="450px" alt="Bee self-blackmailing, i.e., sending itself a black piece of mail" src="https://blog.beeminder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/faire-blackmail-bee.jpeg"/>
Cognata
Verbata: philosophy of akrasia, rationality, behavioral economics, self-coercion, self-blackmail, internal family systems, psychology, self-alignment, hyperbolic discounting,