Robin or Eliezer or Nick, is there any approved way of reporting blogspam here? Or is it safe to assume that you check every comment without any prompting? There’s another one from “mary” on “The 80% Forecasting Solution”, btw.

“Post a bond with your friend, your spouse, your exercise partner, or someone you won’t (or can’t) lie to. You lose the money if you don’t exercise according to a pre-arranged plan with well-defined quantitative goals …

Or why not have the gym collect a bigger upfront fee, and they pay you each time you show up and complete an exercise program under their supervision?”

(source: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/02/why_how_and_how.html )

From the lead to a NY Times magazine article that Roger Lowenstein wrote about Chicago economist Richard Thaler in Feb 2001:

“It is possible that Richard Thaler changed his mind about economic theory and went on to challenge what had become a hopelessly dry and out-of-touch discipline because, one day, when a few of his supposedly rational colleagues were over at his house, he noticed that they were unable to stop themselves from gorging on some cashew nuts he’d put out.”

From “The Odyssey”:

“Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.”

Hal Finney at Overcoming Bias ponders the nature and consequences of present orientation. It relates to one of the most curious of human failures, our inability to successfully act in our own self-perceived best interest. Now it’s not clear that this …

They point out that we often 1) make errors in predicting our reactions to the consequences of our options and 2) fail to make choices based on these predictions. The later failures are due to impulsivity, various decision heuristics (often intended to reduce impulsivity), lay rationalism, medium maximation etc. Ulysses contracts help us with 2. But the contracts appear to mainly aim at reducing impulsivity, which means that the anti-impulsivity biases may now become stronger than is rational, especially given the problems with 1.

As an example, if elderly people are better off spending their money on a good life rather than saving it for “the future” (discussed in the paper) the availability of Ulysses contracts (say, a deal with a bank putting part of the income into a long-term savings account) combined with strong anti-impulsivity memes promoting saving would tempt people into not just an irrational action but a hard to reverse irrational action.

Again, I think the utility of this approach depends on the domain. If we can identify the domains where the biases would not make it irrational (gambling might be a good example) it might be worth focusing there.