# death to auto-widening yellow brick roads

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/death-to-auto-widening-yellow-brick-roads/1440>\
**Category:** uncategorized\
**Created:** [July 27, 2013, 1:50am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/death-to-auto-widening-yellow-brick-roads/1440 "2013-07-27T01:50:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![Philip\_Hellyer](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/philip_hellyer/32/675_2.png) [@Philip\_Hellyer](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Philip_Hellyer)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2013, 2:43pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/death-to-auto-widening-yellow-brick-roads/1440/7 "2013-08-02T14:43:26Z")

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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](http://blog.beeminder.com/roadwidth)
> > 
> > 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:
> > 
> > 1. We’ll keep the first-week leniency: Your weight loss road starts at  
> > the max weigh-in from your first week of data.
> > 
> > 2. 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](http://blog.beeminder.com/glossary/#flatline)
> > 
> > [2] Confusing exception: flat spots have road width equal to max of  
> > the width of the preceding and subsequent segments.
> > 
> > –  
> > [http://dreev.es](http://dreev.es) – search://“Daniel Reeves”  
> > Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == [http://beeminder.com](http://beeminder.com)

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