I arguably cheated on my goal today! Uh oh! I restarted this afternoon but didn’t realize how exhausted I was and ended up taking a nap and feeling pretty sick and out of it. There was no way I was gonna be able to work 6 hours. So I just deleted the datapoints for the goal and I’ll regroup tomorrow.
That post is about entering false data, which is a separate issue entirely - I thought we were talking about calling non-legit on a derailment.
I understand that you entirely believe it, but I still think it’s exaggerated or overstated to say that it will completely destroy the value of Beeminder.
So as I understand your 3 categories, 1/2 refer to something coming up that you didn’t think of putting in your fine print, whereas 3 refers to something you did think to. The problem is that it’s impossible to think of everything.
Ooh, I haven’t encountered this criterion before! It’s a little more flexible than the one I’ve seen, which is “if someone had asked you about this when you made your goal, would you have put it in your fine print?”
So if OP said “ok, in this case, when I worked 7 hours, and with perspective, I am burned out and what I need is to go walking, and doing more work isn’t helpful and is unproductive now - so I’ll add that to my fine print, and call this a non-legit derail” - would you be ok with that?
But I’m not really clear on the difference between 1 and 2. I could see insomnia, for instance, going either way.
Or do you mean claiming a goal was satisfied vs calling non-legit?
I guess I don’t see the point in keeping a long fine print list of 100 things that might cause you to derail, and then continuing to add to it, when the real question is just a judgment call, as you pointed out - is this the kind of thing you signed up to have Beeminder solve?
I’m still a little confused - I thought we were talking about calling non-legit, which gets resolved the next day. And even with the external stuff, like insomnia or feeling sick, you still have to make a judgment call: “how sick am I? Am I just making myself feel sick due to the anxiety of starting on the task? if I start, will it go away? Did I do everything I could to help me sleep? Or did I at least do enough? Or should I have gotten off the phone/computer earlier, or lay down and tried to sleep for longer?” You still have to decide if it’s “something else masquerading as” something external.
So there’s just no way of avoiding the judgment call. This is why, for instance, contract law involves a court looking at the whole circumstances around a breach of contract, and various legal principles, rather than just sticking to the letter of the contract. Because we recognize that any number of different things could happen, and it’s impossible to write a contract that could cover them all (as well as possibly unfair - for instance, you generally aren’t allowed to contract to avoid the force majure doctrine, so even if your contract says you don’t have that protection, a court will still give it to you when something like covid-19 hits.)