Image vs. Impact: Can public commitment be counterproductive for achievement?

Your comment blew my mind.

Alternative: write important things many times.

I'll try this. Thanks!

I have tried that strategy before, and I found it disastrously bad. First, breaking large tasks into small ones, and tweaking the breakdown, is a task itself, which can be used to procrastinate from things that actually need doing. And second, it makes todo lists appear very large, which gave me decision paralysis when it came time to pick something from the list.

The standard GTD advice is that trivial things need to be done and bills need to be paid or you'll end up without electricity at home, so GTD doesn't see this as a big problem.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that pledge-breakers are less likely to be prepared (less use of birth control and condoms) for extramarital sex when they have it anyway. Seems like a clear example of motivational self-deception interfering with rational planning.

Actually, it's an example of a much more specific pattern: Robert Fritz's idea-belief-reality conflict. A social ideal (celibacy) is set up to offset a feared social anti-ideal (sinful promiscuity), setting up two opposing "interests" (in Ainslie's model of the will), one of which is identified with conscious control (celibacy) and one which is not (sex). Since the latter interest is not planned, it is satisfied hastily as soon as preference reversal occurs.

In a perverse way, setting up an ideal for one's self actually strengthens the feared desire or behavior, by making the avoided thing part of a negative self-identity. As Fritz puts it, who would create an ideal of being celibate, but someone who's afraid they won't be celibate? A person with no desire for sex has no reason to make such a big deal out if it.

The same thing applies to any pledge you make a big deal out of. Or as I like to put it, "whatever pushes you forward, holds you back." My past ideal to be organized and productive derived from a fear of being sloppy and lazy, not a desire for actual organization or productivity.

Based on this, I would indeed expect pledges of any sort to be an indicator of a strong desire to do the opposite of the pledged thing. I would expect an even stronger correlation, however, if you separated the people pledging into two groups, based on their answer to the question, "What would happen if you broke your pledge?" If the person answers that something bad will happen, I predict a higher correlation with actual failure than if they say something like, "Well, I wouldn't like it, but I would move on." The latter person is not in "push" or "ideal" territory, the former is.

This prediction is not specific to celibacy pledges, btw; I'm saying that anybody making a public pledge could be sorted into one of those two groups, with the "push" group having a distinctively higher probability of having their effort end in failure, and the other group being more likely to stick to their direction. And it's not so much a matter of my personal observation (although I certainly have observed it ) as it is a logical prediction from Seligman's research into optimism and Dweck's research into the "growth" mindset. "Something bad will happen if I fail" is not a thought engaged in much by optimists or the growth-minded, and it's optimists and growth-minded people who are most likely to succeed when a task needs sticking to.

Right, birth control is basically a conflict between genetic and human interests. Short-leash genetic control is situationally triggered and can be difficult for our conscious mind to admit / predict ahead of time. We think we will have self-control, but when the time comes, the short-leash modules trigger and convince us to have unprotected sex (to advance genetic interests). Making it as easy as possible to not give in to short-leash temptation is important for resisting it, which is why keeping condoms around is better than abstinence, and an IUD or injectable birth control is better yet.

Admittedly there is some rationality to the idea of not just ameliorating temptation but avoiding it. Also I suspect abstinencers have a different utility function than I do - they view sex as bad in and of itself and not just because of consequences like unwanted pregnancies. Their method makes more sense given that viewpoint. If it worked, at least.

My impression is that celibacy pledges do something, although maybe not abstinence education, but I don't trust much of what I read, since it's so politicized. The article you link to says that it doesn't prevent sex before marriage, but that's a pretty high bar. The paper I was talking about (I added a citation above) says that it delays sex by 18 months; that just doesn't get you past marriage. Here is a paper that claims pledges do nothing, that earlier results didn't control for enough.

Let's not worry about absolute effect and instead look for robust results. I think it's robust that seeking abstinence leads to less birth control and a higher ratio of STDs to pregnancies. Also, the point of my original claim, about embattled minorities, is robust to that kind of selection bias.

~(status-seeking --> ~altruistic)

Why are we assuming these categories are mutually exclusive? Like Will points out, if we just accept that altruism and status-seeking are inextricable then we can design societies where altruistic behavior has high status returns. I guess I don't get the usefulness of the distinction.

Status seekers probably greatly outnumber true altruists.

But you should tend to keep the status seekers out of positions of great responsibility IMHO even if doing so greatly reduces the total number of volunteers working on existential risks.

My tentative belief that status seekers will not do as good a job BTW stems from (1) first-hand observation and second-hand observation of long-term personal performance as a function of personal motivation in domains such as science-learning, programming, management and politics and (2) a result from social psychology that intrinsic reinforcers provide more reliable motivation than extrinsic reinforcers (for more about which, google "Punished by Rewards").

The last thing the future light cone needs is for existential-risk activism to become the next big thing in how to show prospective friends and prospective lovers how cool you are.

I was part of a meetup on "alternative energy" (to see if actual engineers went to the things--I didn't want to date a solar cell) when I got an all-group email from the group founder about an "event" concerning The Secret* and a great opportunity to make money. Turned out it was a "green" multi-level marketing scam he was deep in, and they were combining it with the The Secret. Being naive, at first I said I didn't think the event was appropriate, assuming it might lead to some discussion. He immediately slandered me to the group, but I managed to send out an email detailing his connections to the scam before I was banned from the group. I did get a thank you from one of the members, at least.

I looked through meetup and found many others connected to him. Their basic routine involves paying the meetup group startup cost, having a few semi-legit meetings, and then using their meetup group as a captive audience.

I admit, I was surprised. I know it's not big news, but the new social web has plenty of new social scammers, and they're running interference. It's hard to get a strong, clear message out when opportunists know how to capitalize on easy money: people wanting to feel and signal like they're doing something. I honestly don't think seasteading can even touch that audience, but then again, I'm not sure you'd want to.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(2006_film)