One of the benefits of Beeminder graphs is the predictability that they
bring to my life. At the extreme, I react to beemergency days and JFDI the
task. At its best, I will notice that my gym-going graph will be in the
red within 3 days, so I plan a gym morning into my schedule. Being able to
predict when the emergency days are going to hit, and take steps to make my
life less reactive, is one of the intangible benefits of Beeminder.[1]
Weight graphs are not predictable in the same way. I can see my gym-going
emergency day coming, but I won’t know that it’s a weight beemergency until
I stand on the scale in the morning. [2]
This morning was such a day, and happily I had already intended to go to
the gym. (Turns out that it’s possible to get back on the road without
resorting to Danny’s dozen weigh-ins. 
My first weigh-in was well into
the red. I had a bit of breakfast, ran to the gym, swam, stretched, and
ran back, adequately hydrated throughout. And weighed-in at 0.3kg lighter.
Sufficient to get me back on the road & safely achieved.)
We used to only allow one weigh-in each day, and I think it caused people
to dread standing on the scale. So they’d not weigh in daily, which meant
they’d lose sight of their progress (or regress), which meant they’d be
more likely to derail, etc. That was ‘fixed’ by the road-widening
guarantee. So Danny’s absolutely right that we’ve piled one hack on top of
another, and that it’s high time we identify & resolve the underlying
problem.
(@Katherine: You can, by emailing support, have us change how multiple
weigh-ins are counted or aggregated. I think “first of the day” is still an
option.)
I don’t have a problem with doing my daily weigh-in, so the argument that
I’ll still step through the colours on my way to derailing doesn’t apply to
me. (And wouldn’t occur if presumptive-pessimism is implemented.) I think
that the turquoise swath itself might be vestigial; it used to clearly show
the difference between actual data slope and road slope. With
auto-re-railment, most of my data points follow the road, and the turquoise
swath does the same. (I’ve turned the swath back on for a few goals to see
whether it’s more interesting than I remember.)
I’ve always liked that we treat different types of graph differently.
Weight loss graphs are for absolute measures that vary, but where the goal
is a downward trend. This is substantively different from counting units
of progress that increase monotonically.
It seems that a razor-thin road will force me into exactly the situation
that Danny wants to avoid. My reality will be governed by an indiscernible
and invisible line somewhere below the road. I predict an increase in
derailments.[3]
The occasional derailment on the path to a goal is fine, provided that I
think I’ve made good progress that wouldn’t have occurred without
Beeminder. Seemingly spurious beyond-my-control derailments don’t fall in
that category. Double plus bad, on so many levels.
Having said all of that:
It’s possible that a presumptively-pessimistic view of safe-days will be
enough to let me see where I really am with respect to the road edge.
It certainly would change the games that I can play with myself; instead of
paying slightly more attention to my diet when I’m orange, that will need
to become a rule like ‘if today I’m heavier than yesterday’ or ‘if fewer
than 2 safe days’ or something less obviously derived from the graph and
its colouring.
But I’m still doubtful that this is for the best, and still welcome being
mistaken.
Philip
[1] My life seems to be in a continual state of imbalance. If I’m on top
of my physical health, my work suffers. If I’m on top of conference
speaking, my other commitments suffer. If I’m caught up on email,
something else suffers. And so on. One of the roles that Beeminder plays
for me is to ensure that I keep all the important plates spinning a little,
regardless of where my impetuous focus currently lies.
[2] For this same reason, auto-data goals need to do their first fetch
before I check my graphs in the morning. Can’t be finding out part-way
through my day that something is going to derail at midnight. (I suppose
that I could force this behaviour by setting a stupidly early morning
panic-email time, but it should be standard.)
[3] Worse, unexpected derailments will encourage more conservative roads,
which are thinner in the new regime, which will cause more derailments,
etc. Which screws with the benefit of beeminding. (And is reminiscent of
the dreaded-weigh-in loop that lead us to auto-widening roads in the first
place…)
On Friday, August 2, 2013 2:47:40 PM UTC+1, Katherine Baxter wrote:
I just joined this list, and I’ll probably have something more substantial
to say about weight goals later after reading more of the discussion, but I
wanted to reply now because I object pretty strongly to the idea of letting
you weigh in multiple times in one day and taking the lowest value. I had
no idea (and now wish I still didn’t know) it worked that way now. I always
weigh myself only once, first thing in the morning. Later in the day when
I’m hydrated and fed, I am ~5lbs heavier. That’s 3.5% of my weight for me -
it would be more for a larger person. If I’m off my road when I first weigh
in in the morning, I don’t think there’s anything healthy I can do to get
back on later in the day, and I definitely don’t want to incentivize myself
to do unhealthy things just to stay on my road.
I’m adding fine print to my weight goal that says I am only allowed to
record the first weight I measure on a particular day.
Why on earth does it work this way?
On Friday, July 26, 2013 9:50:52 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:
This is madness: The Magical Widening Yellow Brick Road | Beeminder Blog
At the time we kind of painted ourselves into that corner and didn’t
see a way out. We thought we needed auto-widening to solve a
psychological problem with weight loss (or more generally, akrasia
with respect to a noisy metric) where you try to skate too close to
the edge and sooner or later get burned by a random fluctuation.
Auto-widening was a (too) clever solution given the constraints we
started with: your first weigh-in in the morning is your official
weight, and you don’t get to peek at what it’s going to be before
reporting it. In that universe, you need guidance from Beeminder on
when to panic. The answer was, if you’re in the wrong lane today then
you have to panic because you might be doomed when you step on the
scale in the morning. Auto-widening meant it was time to panic if and
only if you found yourself in the wrong lane, which is the important
bit of psychology. There has to be a way to save up the panic and hit
you with it all at once so that you actually do panic. (No
wolf-crying.) Auto-widening does that. If you’re in the right lane
then you don’t have to panic yet. You can’t lose tomorrow. If you’re
in the wrong lane, you can lose tomorrow.
(Also it sounds really good – “Beeminder uses fancy maths to
automatically adapt to random fluctuation in your weight” – which
will make this hard to throw away!)
But all the strategery is different in the current universe. Beeminder
takes the min weight of the day, and you can keep weighing in all day
long, till midnight. So now there’s no true cause for panic unless
you’re actually in the red, in which case you have to claw your way
back on the road by the end of the day. For a true akratic doing the
absolute bare minimum to cling to the edge of their road,
auto-widening is now meaningless. If I’m not in the red I just don’t
give a shit.
A huge amount of cruft and confusion and corner cases (not to mention
at least one long-standing bug) in Beeminder will go away when we drop
auto-widening.
Yay for (eventual) progress! And thanks so much to everyone on this
list who helped us hash this out! (And the hashing can continue, of
course.)
Technical addendum:
-
We’ll keep the first-week leniency: Your weight loss road starts at
the max weigh-in from your first week of data.
-
The can’t-lose-tomorrow guarantee will still obtain, in a sense,
but only applies for flatlining [1]. The width of each lane of the
road is always equal to the current daily rate of the road [2]. So
being just into the green today and reporting nothing means blue
tomorrow, orange the next day, and red the day after that.
[1] Beeminder Glossary | Beeminder Blog
[2] Confusing exception: flat spots have road width equal to max of
the width of the preceding and subsequent segments.
–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com