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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I think that the problem is simple. People respond poorly to long-term rewards. You need to set up a short-term reward payoff cycle.

https://buildingpharmabrands.com/2013/05/27/the-ad-that-crea... is inspiring that way. It shows how people who could not be motivated to solve a well-known long-term problem, tooth decay, were successfully motivated to solve a short-term problem that they previously ignored - the fact that you wake up with film over your mouth that doesn't feel very good.

Long-term problems without good short-term feedback loops rewarding the proper behavior are hard, and will probably always be hard for humans. So rather than increasing the reward for the long-term issue, we need to find good short-term reinforcements for good behavior.

(Yeah, easier said than done...)

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Isn't that exactly how this program was operating? Short-term reward payoff: monthly cash; long-term reward: children graduate from school.

In the context of brain psychology, short-term needs to be seconds to minutes. For example try to train a dog with rewards that come an hour later. It won't work.

In the example that I gave, you brush your teeth, your mouth feels better right away. That works.

By contrast if you start working on your project now, next week you won't have a miserable all-nighter. That doesn't work. Just ask anyone in college if you doubt me.

That is why a monthly feedback cycle did not prove to be successful motivation here.

Gamify anti-poverty programs?

I wonder though, isn't forgoing small short-term rewards for greater long-term rewards a key aspect of escaping poverty? How can you condition that behavior with short-term rewards?

That's a good question, and I don't have a good answer.

But well-off people that I know manage to forgo short-term rewards by having an internal counteracting short-term reward in line with the desired long-term reward. Maybe this is a teachable skill..?

This article suggests that delayed gratification can be taught ...

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1182

>I think that the problem is simple.

No. Poverty is an extraordinarily complex problem. Its root cause isn't even fully agreed upon by those who have studied it. The example in your link is not even remotely comparable or analogous.

Everyone who thinks a long-term unsolved problem is simple:

https://xkcd.com/1831/

...except in this case, poverty has been around for 1000s of years unsolved.

"The problem" I am discussing was the problem causing this program to not work as desired.

The problems that lead to poverty are another story. They are indeed complex. And any discussion of it is made harder by the fact that people superimpose their morality+politics on top of the discussion.

I don't even want to begin to tackle that...

The actual problem here is giving someone $180/mo in one of the most expensive cities in the country is worthless. It failed to change anything simply because $180 isn’t ever going to change anything for someone who’s improverished and living in city where basic rent is 10x that amount.

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