dreeves

Joined 19 years ago

Karma

1,902

Submissions

473

Member since

Apr 1

Daniel Reeves -- [email protected]

Startup: Beeminder.com

Blog: MessyMatters.com and blog.beeminder.com

Homepage: http://dreev.es

Twitter.com/dreev

Favorite programming language: Mathematica

Random fact: Dreeves is an ultra-marathon inline skater

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dreeves; my proof: https://keybase.io/dreeves/sigs/mI0Bo0pl9pdIvoPJFjh4SDWZ2B107EXXH4L2fw_XOrE ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago

Encouraging update on the status page:

"The issue is related to heating/cooling complications in the data center due to a power outage . The power outage has been fixed and we are working quickly to bring our services back online."

Comment · 1 year ago

More assurance that it's not just us: https://downdetector.com/status/linode/

"Mal de muchos, consuela de tontos."

Comment · 1 year ago

Some signs of life from some of our servers now. Still no word from Linode.

Comment · 1 year ago

Is this hard downtime for anyone else? We're not sure what they mean by "emerging service issue" and they haven't replied to our support ticket yet.

Comment · 1 year ago

My counterargument: https://agifriday.substack.com/p/jevons

Short version: Jevons's paradox means that the more coding you automate away for developers (like with compilers in the past), the more in-demand those developers are. (Until AGI when all bets are off, of course.)

Comment · 2 years ago

That's our (Beeminder's) esteemed, if now somewhat moribund, competitor, StickK. See https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity for our argument against anti-charities like that.

Comment · 2 years ago

Hi! Beeminder cofounder here. We do have a charity option but only in our most expensive premium plan. My own feeling is that a commitment contract with a charity as a beneficiary is less effective because what kind of jerk is motivated to avoid donating to charity? Unless you set the stakes so high that you can't really afford it, I guess?

Comment · 3 years ago

Congrats on the launch! I think this is powerful and handles the use cases you've listed better than Beeminder can currently. So that's exciting for us -- we love worthy competitors!

Speaking of which, here's a list of all such competitors we know of: https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/

(Adding Discipline.io to the list now...)

Comment · 3 years ago

Beeminder cofounder here! Thanks for the plug! So much to say here but maybe I'll start with a pointer to our philosophy on anti-charities: https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/ (short version: we hate them).

Comment · 4 years ago

Ah, this continues to be good feedback. Thanks for continuing to hash it out with me! I see I made it sound like there were a lot of moving parts in my argument for why our incentives aren't so perverse. I don't think that's the case! In particular, I don't think my argument relies on what kind of people we are. I mean, it relies on us not turning totally evil and myopic, but that's true of any company. If we started effectively wrongly charging you, you'd cry foul and quit.

I'm worried I'm not really grokking your underlying argument though. Maybe it just feels gross to have this kind of setup with a third party as opposed to doing it with friends. That's the kind of thing I can't argue with so if it's something like that we can leave it at that. Thanks again for helping me think through how to convey our pitch for the general non-perverseness of it in any case.

Comment · 4 years ago

Hi! Beeminder cofounder here! I'm pretty excited to see all the positive comments but of course I've homed in on this negative one first. I think Beeminder is incentivized to make you fail at your goals the same way eBay sellers are incentivized to not actually send you your stuff after you pay them.

Anyway, we have a whole elaborate essay on why there's very much the opposite of a conflict of interest: https://blog.beeminder.com/defail/ (about how Beeminder revenue is proportional to induced user awesomeness)

There's a key faulty assumption that may make it seem like our incentives are more perverse than they are. Namely, it's not the case that Beeminder goals are binary things that you either succeed or fail at. They're things you make long-term graphs of, like averaging 10k steps per day or working 40 hours per week. You pay Beeminder because your overall progress is much greater with Beeminder than without it, even though the specific moments you pay are kicks in the pants when you've deviated from your commitment.

I'm definitely interested to hear if any of this is persuasive. We hear the perverse incentives thing a lot so we need to figure out how to convey our apologia much more concisely in our intro material! (And thank you for voicing it!)

Comment · 4 years ago

Thanks for the plug! See also https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors

Comment · 4 years ago

Scott Aaronson adds the following in the comment on his blog post in response to a question about this:

> the NDA is about OpenAI’s intellectual property, e.g. aspects of their models that give them a competitive advantage, which I don’t much care about and won’t be working on anyway. They want me to share the research I’ll do about complexity theory and AI safety.

Comment · 4 years ago

> In my opinion these automated solutions seldom work in the long run

Beeminder cofounder here. Can I hear more about why you think this? There are definitely people for whom Beeminder doesn't work at all but you sound like you're making a different claim -- that it may work for a while but then stop working. That's the opposite of our experience. Our churn numbers get really good for those who stick around for a year and anecdotally we have lots of people getting PhD theses written thanks to Beeminder, etc.

But if you've had short-term success with things like Beeminder -- https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors -- and then had it fail, that would be valuable to hear more about.

Oh, and I should mention that Beeminder isn't necessarily entirely automated. If you derail and are about to be charged money but don't agree that it was a legit derailment, you talk to a human about that.

Comment · 4 years ago

Oh! Beeminder's not actually affiliated with TaskRatchet. We're just friends with the creator of it and have promoted it a lot and have an autodata integration with it, etc. See https://blog.beeminder.com/taskratchet -- which is a guest post by the TaskRatchet creator on the Beeminder blog (so, um, I can see where the confusion came from!).