"Self-Blackmail" and Alternatives

post by jessicata (jessica.liu.taylor) · 2025-02-09T23:20:19.895Z · LW · GW · 12 comments

This is a link post for https://unstableontology.com/2025/02/09/self-blackmail-and-alternatives/

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Ziz has been in the news lately. Instead of discussing that, I'll discuss an early blog post, "Self-Blackmail". This is a topic I also talked with Ziz about in person, although not a lot.

Let's start with a very normal thing people do: make New Year's resolutions. They might resolve that, for example, they will do strenuous exercise at least 2 times a week for the next year. Conventional wisdom is that these are not very effective.

Part of the problem is that breaking commitments even once cheapens the commitment: once you have "cheated" once, there's less of a barrier to cheating in the future. So being sparing about these explicit commitments can make them more effective:

I once had a file I could write commitments in. If I ever failed to carry one out, I knew I'd forever lose the power of the file. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since any successful use of the file after failing would be proof that a single failure didn't have the intended effect, so there'd be no extra incentive.

If you always fulfill the commitments, there is an extra incentive to fulfill additional commitments, namely, it can preserve the self-fulfilling prophecy that you always fulfill commitments. Here's an example in my life: sometimes, when I have used addictive substances (e.g. nicotine), I have made a habit of tracking usage. I'm not trying to commit not to use them, rather, I'm trying to commit to track usage. This doesn't feel hard to maintain, and it has benefits, such as noticing changes in the amount of substance consumed. And it's in an area, addictive substances, where conventional wisdom is that human intuition is faulty and willpower is especially useful.

Ziz describes using this technique more extensively, in order to do more work:

I used it to make myself do more work. It split me into a commander who made the hard decisions beforehand, and commanded who did the suffering but had the comfort of knowing that if I just did the assigned work, the benevolent plans of a higher authority would unfold. As the commanded, responsibility to choose wisely was lifted from my shoulders. I could be a relatively shortsighted animal and things'd work out fine. It lasted about half a year until I put too much on it with too tight a deadline. Then I was cursed to be making hard decisions all the time. This seems to have improved my decisions, ultimately.

Compared to my "satisficer" usage of self-blackmail to track substance usage, this is more of a "maximizer" style where Ziz tries to get a lot of work out of it. This leads to more problems, because the technique relies on consistency, which is more achievable with light "satisficer" commitments.

There's a deeper problem, though. Binding one's future self is confused at a psychological and decision-theoretic level:

Good leadership is not something you can do only from afar. Hyperbolic discounting isn't the only reason you can't see/feel all the relevant concerns at all times. Binding all your ability to act to the concerns of the one subset of your goals manifested by one kind of timeslice of you is wasting potential, even if that's an above-average kind of timeslice.

If you're not feeling motivated to do what your thesis advisor told you to do, it may be because you only understand that your advisor (and maybe grad school) is bad for you and not worth it when it is directly and immediately your problem. This is what happened to me. But I classified it as procrastination out of "akrasia".

Think back to the person who made a New Year's resolution to strenuously exercise twice a week. This person may, in week 4, have the thought, "I made this commitment, and I really need to exercise today to make it, but I'm so busy, and tired. I don't want to do this. But I said I would. It's important. I want to keep the commitment that is in my long-term interest, not just do whatever seems right in the moment." This is a self-conflicted psychological mode. Such self-conflict corresponds to decision-theoretic irrationality.

One type of irrationality is the mentioned hyperbolic discounting; self-blackmail could, theoretically, be a way of correcting dynamic inconsistencies in time preference. However, as Ziz notes, there are also epistemic and computational problems: the self who committed to a New Year's resolution has thought about the implications little, and lacks relevant information to the future decisions, such as how busy they will be over the year.

A sometimes very severe problem is that the self-conflicted psychological state can have a lot of difficulty balancing different considerations and recruiting the brain's resources towards problem-solving. This is often experienced as "akrasia". A commitment to, for example, a grad school program, can generate akrasia, due to the self-conflict between the student's feeling that they should finish the program, and other considerations that could lead to not doing so, but which are suppressed from consideration, as they seem un-virtuous. In psychology, this can be known as "topdog vs. underdog".

Personally, I have the repeated experience of being excited about the project and working on it with others, but becoming demotivated over time, eventually quitting. This is expensive, in both time and money. At the time, I often have difficulty generating reasons why continuing to work on the project is a bad idea. But, usually, a year later, it's very easy to come up with reasons why quitting was a good idea.

Ziz is glad that the self-blackmail technique ultimately failed. There are variations that have more potential sustainability, such as Beeminder:

These days there's Beeminder. It's a far better designed commitment mechanism. At the core of typical use is the same threat by self fulfilling prophecy. If you lie to Beeminder about having accomplished the thing you committed to, you either prove Beeminder has no power over you, or prove that lying to Beeminder will not break its power over you, which means it has no consequences, which means Beeminder has no power over you.

But Beeminder lets you buy back into its service.

It's worse than a crutch, because it doesn't just weaken you through lack of forced practice. You are practicing squashing down your capacity to act on "What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?" in the moment. When you set your future self up to lose money if they don't do what you say, you are practicing being blackmailed.

Beeminder is a method for staking money on completing certain goals. Since lying to Beeminder is psychologically harder than simply breaking a commitment you wrote to yourself, use of Beeminder can last longer than use of the original self-blackmail technique. Also, being able to buy back into the service makes a "reset" possible, which was not possible with the original technique.

Broadly, I agree with Ziz that self-blackmail techniques, and variations like Beeminder, are imprudent to use ambitiously. I think there are beneficial "satisfier" usages of these techniques, such as for tracking addictive substance usage; one is not in these cases tempted to stack big, hard-to-follow commitments.

What interests me more, though, are better ways to handle commitments in general, both commitments to the self and to others. I see a stronger case for explicit commitments with enforcement when dealing with other agents. For example, a contract to rent a car has terms signed by both parties, with potential legal enforcements for violating the terms.

This has obvious benefits. Even if you could theoretically get the benefits of car rental contracts with the ideal form of TDT spiritual love between moral agents, that's computationally expensive at best. Contract law is a common part of successful mercantile cultures for a reason.

And, as with the original self-blackmail technique, there are potential self-fulfilling ways of keeping your word to another; you can be trusted more to fulfill commitments in the future if you always fulfils commitments made in the past. (Of course, to always fulfil commitments requires being sparing about making them.)

Let's now consider, rather than inter-personal commitments, self-commitments. Consider alternatives to making a new year's resolution to exercise twice a week. Suppose you actually believe that you will do resistance training about twice a week for the next year. Then, perhaps it is prudent to invest in a home gym. Investing in the gym is, in a way, a "bet" about your future actions: it will turn out to have been not worth it, if you rarely use it. Though, it's an unusual type of bet, in that the outcome of the bet is determined by your future actions (thus potentially being influenced by self-fulfilling prophecies).

A more general formula: Instead of making a commitment from sheer force of will, think about the range of possible worlds where you actually fulfill the commitment. Think about what would be good decisions right now, conditional on fulfilling the commitment in the future. These are "bets" on fulfilling the commitment, and are often well thought of as "investments". Now, ask two questions:

1. If I take these initial steps, do I expect that I'll fulfill the commitment?
2. If I take these initial steps, and then fulfill the commitment, do I overall like the result, compared to the default alternative?

If the answers to both are "yes", that suggests that the commitment-by-bet is overall prudent, compared with the default. (Of course, there are more possible actions if the answer to either question is "no", including re-thinking the commitment or the initial steps, or going ahead with the initial steps anyway on expected value grounds.)

The overall idea here is to look for natural decision-theoretic commitment opportunities. Investing in a home gym, for example, is a good idea for people who make some sorts of decisions in the future (like regular resistance training), and a bad idea for people who make different sorts of decisions in the future. It's not an artificial mechanism like giving your stuff to a friend who only gives it back if you exercise enough. It's a feature of the decision-theoretic landscape, where making certain decisions ahead of time is only prudent conditional on certain future actions.

Something hard to model here is the effect of such investments/bets on a person's future action through "self-fulfilling-prophecy" or "hyperstitional" means. For example, perhaps if you actually invest in a home gym, people including you will think of you as the sort of person who benefits from a home gym, who is a sort of person who exercises regularly. Such a change to one's self-image, and external image, can influence what it feels natural to do in the future.

To be clear, I'm not recommending making performative investments in things corresponding to what you would like to be doing in the future. Instead, I'm advising thinking through what would actually be a good investment conditional on the imagined future actions. For example, even if you are going to exercise regularly, it's not clear that a home gym is a good investment: a gym membership may be a better idea. And it's prudent to take into account the chance of not exercising in the future, making the investment useless: my advised decision process counts this as a negative, not a useful self-motivating punishment. The details will, of course, depend on the specific situation.

This sort of commitment-by-bet can be extended to inter-personal situations, to some degree. For example, suppose two people like the idea of living together long-term. They could, as an alternative to making promises to each other about this, think of bets/investments that would be a good idea conditional on living together long-term, such as getting a shared mortgage on a house. That's more likely to be prudent conditional on them living together long-term. And the cost of not living together is denominated more materially and financially, rather than in broken promises.

To summarize: I suggest, as an alternative to making explicit commitments that they feels bound by in the future, people could consider locating commitment opportunities that are already out there, in the form of decisions that are only prudent conditional on some future actions; taking such an opportunity constitutes a "bet" or "investment" on taking those actions in the future. This overall seems to be more compatible with low levels of psychological self-conflict, which has broad benefits to the committer's ability to un-confusedly model the world and act agentically.

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