I recently had an interesting though about the Auto-Ratchet system, and I’m not sure if it’s been discussed here or elsewhere yet, apologies if it has!
Let’s start with an example: You have a Beeminder set up for 50 push-ups/day, and you use the Auto-Ratchet to automatically cap the safety buffer to 0 days. That means no matter how many push-ups you did yesterday, the required amount will always be 50 the next day.
With that all set, let’s say that today in particular you decided to do an extreme workout and did 150 push-ups!
You then go to your Beeminder and, feeling exhausted, change the Auto-Ratchet’s safety buffer cap from 0 to 2 days. Since you did 150 today that means, with the new settings, you wouldn’t have to do any tomorrow, or the next day!
So my question is this: Is this fair, or is it weasel behaviour?
And perhaps a follow-up if it is considered weasel behaviour: Should there be a 7-day period before changes to the Auto-Ratchet take effect?