Cofounder of Beeminder
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A couple days ago I wanted to paste a paragraph from Sarah Constantin's latest post on AGI into Discord and of course the italicizing disappeared which drives me bananas and I thought there must exist tools for solving that problem and there are but they're all abominations so I said to ChatGPT (4o),
can you build a simple html/javascript app with two text areas. the top text area is for rich text (rtf) and the bottom for plaintext markdown. whenever any text in either text area changes, the app updates the other text area. if the top one changes, it converts it to markdown and updates the bottom one. if the bottom one changes, it converts it to rich text and updates the top one.
aaaand it actually did it and I pasted it into Replit and... it didn't work but I told it what errors I was seeing and continued going back and forth with it and ended up with the following tool without touching a single line of code: eat-the-richtext.dreev.es
PS: Ok, I ended up going back and forth with it a lot (12h45m now in total, according to TagTime) to get to the polished state it's in now with tooltips and draggable divider and version number and other bells and whistles. But as of version 1.3.4 it's 100% ChatGPT's code with me guiding it in strictly natural language.
1Here's a decade-old gem from Scott Alexander, "If Climate Change Happened To Have Been Politicized In The Opposite Direction"
I think this is a persuasive case that commitment devices aren't good for you. I'm very interested in how common this is, and if there's a way you could reframe commit devices to avoid this psychological reaction to them. One idea is to focus on incentive alignment that avoids the far end of the spectrum. With Beeminder in particular, you could set a low pledge cap and then focus on the positive reinforcement of keeping your graph pretty by keeping the datapoints on the right side of the red line.
I guess in practice it'd be the tiniest shred of plausible deniability. If your prior is that alice@example.com almost surely didn't enter the contest (p=1%) but her hash is in the table (which happens by chance with p=1/1000) then you Bayesian-update to a 91% chance that she did in fact enter the contest. If you think she had even a 10% chance on priors then her hash being in the table makes you 99% sure it's her.
To make sure I understand this concern:
It may be better to use a larger hash space to avoid an internal (in the data set) collisions, but then you lower the number of external collisions.
Are you thinking someone may want plausible deniability? "Yes, my email hashes to this entry with a terrible Brier score but that could've been anyone!"
This should be fine. In past years, Scott has had an interface where you could enter your email address and get your score. So the ability to find out other people's scores by knowing their email address is apparently not an issue. And it makes sense to me that one's score in this contest isn't particularly sensitive private information.
Source: Comment from Scott on the ACX post announcing the results
"At some point one of those groups will be devoured by snakes" is erroneous
I wouldn't say erroneous but I've added this clarification to the original question:
"At some point one of those groups will be devoured by snakes and then I stop" has an implicit "unless I roll snake eyes forever". I.e., we are not conditioning on the game ending with snake eyes. The probability of an infinite sequences of non-snake-eyes is zero and that's the sense in which it's correct to say "at some point snake eyes will happen" but non-snake-eyes forever is possible in the technical sense of "possible".
It sounds contradictory but "probability zero" and "impossible" are mathematically distinct concepts. For example, consider flipping a coin an infinite number of times. Every infinite sequence like HHTHTTHHHTHT... is a possible outcome but each one has probability zero.
So I think it's correct to say "if I flip a coin long enough, at some point I'll get heads" even though we understand that "all tails forever" is one of the infinitely many possible sequences of coin flips.
Just set it up in the Beeminder work Slack and I am immediately in love 😍
First forecast: Will at least 4 of us (including me) play this reindeer game? (96% probability so far)
Ooh, I think there's a lot of implicit Beeminder criticism here that I'm eager to understand better. Thanks for writing this up!
We previously argued against similar claims -- https://blog.beeminder.com/blackmail/ -- and said that the "just get the different parts of yourself to get along" school of thought was insufficiently specific about how to do that. But here you've suggested some smart, specific ideas and they sound good!
My other Beeminder defense is that there are certain bare minimums that you know it would be irrational to fall below. So I recommend having the Beeminder goal as insurance and then also implementing all the strategies you describe. If those strategies work and it's easy-peasy to stay well above Beeminder's bright red line, then wonderful. Conflict avoided. If those strategies happen to fail, Beeminder will catch you. (Also you get a nice graph of your progress, quantified-self-style.)
PS: More recently we had a post about how compatible Beeminder turns out to be with CBT which I think also argues against the dichotomy you're implying here with Conflict vs Cooperation. https://blog.beeminder.com/cbt/
Ah, thank you! Sounds like Obsidian users will find this more convenient than eat-the-richtext. Maybe we could start a list of other editors or tools that solve this problem...