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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to do stupid things.

One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k"

... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?

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$5k is a high strike price, but this is the point of a commitment device.

By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting is easy".

If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you should have some strong, intrinsic reason for it.

Thanks for introducing me to the word “akrasia”!

Read "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie, if this is your first introduction to that word.

Maybe its so awful that it’s worth $5000 not to have to do it anymore—but at least you won’t quit over anything smaller than that, and the number of times you will regret losing $5000 and your self-respect will probably be outweighed by the number of times you accomplish something you might not have otherwise and at least take a little bit of lasting pride in it.

Then you accept that and pay your friend the $5k. No need to loose a friend just because you don't want to write a book.

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