Introducing ‘Playpumps Productivity System’
I am an EA from Pōneke/Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. I know that some of my EA friends here struggle to motivate themselves enough. The bloke from replacing guilt says this isn’t a big deal, but I haven’t gotten far enough through to let go of my intuition yet that you just need better guilt. Today, I want to offer you a way to supercharge the guilt you feel about even the smallest behaviours in your life.
The idea behind the Playpumps Productivity System is that even your most micro level struggles can become issues of life or death. Users purchase milli-lives, representing one thousandth of the high end of the expected cost to save a life via the Givewell Maximum Impact Fund. If the user succeeds in their goal, the money is donated to the Maximum Impact Fund. This is a good outcome. If the user fails, the money will be used in an attempt to buy playpumps. This is a bad outcome because it is the most lindy of knowledge that playpumps are very bad, but also because I will (very lightly) scold users who fail in this way and—per my understanding of the teachings of Singer—have committed literal murder (or X number of milli-murders, I suppose).
I highly recommend this system, and look forward to helping you achieve great (or less mediocre) things.
Please check out the Playpumps Productivity System at https://forms.gle/Ziu4JiuHySiAdSrR6
Please, please don’t make me buy a Playpump.
I recognise this is a bit tongue and cheek, but I would like to share how crazy helpful things like this can be. A few times in my life now I’ve used beeminder.com (something similar to what’s described here) to build or crack habits.
One difference services like beeminder offer, compared to what’s described here, is the daily accountability aspect, which enables (healthy) habit formation. I think the daily aspect it’s nearly as important as the accountability aspect, as it very quickly becomes about protecting your “streak”.
If this is one step towards building an EA habit formation program, I’m 100% on board. I could very much imagine getting EAs to follow through ideas with actions to be high impact, and worth someone’s time.
At least for me, I think daily accountability—and having to write a reflection if you fail to meet your goals—is a lot greater of an incentive than the threat of donating to PlayPumps a few months down the line.
Logging back in for the first time in a while (regular reader, less regular poaster) - if anyone returns here, I wanted to note that the Triple-P enjoyed a 100% success rating (n=1, not including myself). I’m conscious that even very high quality social science research doesn’t always easily replicate, but caution anyone reading this not to ignore such a powerful result.
Why is the Google Form closed?