{"id":403,"date":"2008-05-22T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T16:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=403"},"modified":"2008-05-22T12:00:48","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T16:00:48","slug":"my-theoretical-charity-of-choice-george-w-bush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/my-theoretical-charity-of-choice-george-w-bush\/","title":{"rendered":"My theoretical charity of choice: George W. Bush"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with stickk.com<\/a>. What stickk.com lets you do is pick a commitment – say, to exercise for 3 hours per week – and then sign a contract saying that if you don’t meet the commitment, a certain sum of money will be given to the anti-charity of your choice.<\/p>\n

My anti-charity is the Bush Memorial Library. If I should miss making a commitment, I’ll be making an automatic 50 dollar donation. It’s a good choice for me personally, since even though I dislike Bush I won’t feel too bad if I strike out (it’s just a library, not a re-election fund), but find that thinking about Bush really motivates me to keep my commitments.<\/p>\n

To keep you honest, you get to nominate an independent referee and supporters.<\/p>\n

It works surprisingly well. When I get up in the morning, and just can’t stand the thought of going to the treadmill, I simply bring an image of Bush to mind. It gets me energized every time. So far I’m 5 from 5 – I’ve met every one of my commitments. I’m tempted to put a poster of the man up somewhere.<\/p>\n

Psychologically, the effect is weird. In economic terms, I seem to apply a pretty steep discount factor to my future time. That is, the site exploits the fact that when I’m making my commitment, I put a much lower value on my future time than I actually do in the moment. It’s a clever trick.<\/p>\n

One other oddity is that the effect seems to last. I’ve found that even when I take a week off, it seems to be a lot easier to keep the commitments anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with stickk.com. What stickk.com lets you do is pick a commitment – say, to exercise for 3 hours per week – and then sign a contract saying that if you don’t meet the commitment, a certain sum of money will be given to the anti-charity of your choice.… Continue reading My theoretical charity of choice: George W. Bush<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}