Global charge cap?

Akrasia
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I was thinking about a problem with the current beeminder structure where you can be disincentivized to make goals more fine-grained, because then your monetary liability is higher (since a “bad day” could mean derailing on, e.g. ten goals instead of three).

One idea I had is being able to opt-in to a global charge cap, so you can be confident you won’t be charged more than the cap on any given day (you could also combine this with a mechanism to ensure that you aren’t hit with seven days of at-cap charges, by allowing a user who has hit the charge cap on a particular day to also derail on any other goal even if it’s not a beemergency).

A downside to this setup is that it can turn your bad days into catastrophe days, in the sense that you might decide that once you get near/at the charge cap there’s no reason for you to put any further effort into anything beeminder-related for that day/week. But that’s a tradeoff that you’d be choosing by setting a charge cap, and might consider it worth it.

I’m sure there are other solutions to this problem; you can implement it today in userspace by putting “If I get charged more than $N in a day then I can add fake data to this goal” in the fine-print for every goal, but I like to avoid fake data as much as I can.

I suppose another structure that gets basically the same effect is, instead of a charge cap, you have a “pay $N to temporarily remove the akrasia horizons on all goals” feature (where the $N is user-selected, and changes to it are subject to the akrasia horizon).

I dunno, just a small pile of ideas.

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It’s an interesting thought. Definitely an issue is the huge amount of buffer you usually have things configured to give you on derailing—would not be great to have the temptation to just give up for the day, as you say, but as a result get a bunch of buffer. On the other hand, if you didn’t do this, then there would be some weird thing where you had to decide which goals derail for the day.

The last thing ("pay to edit goals inside akrasia horizon) wouldn’t have this issue, but also feels like a bigger change.

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Last night I’ve derailed on ~10 goals all at $5. These were relatively fine-grained, covering a total of 3-4 primary goals I’ve talked about in another thread. As part of that attempt to reap all the benefit from Beeminder… Here’s what’s going on through my mind.

Some are tangentially related, but I think they relate to one of the problems addressed here: the jump from $5 to a many-times higher cost disincentivizes making more fine-grained goals. (Fine-grained goals are otherwise helpful in covering various aspects of one goal. Putting such “multi-dimensional guardrails” in place helps, otherwise, optimize the awesomeness achieved by Beeminder usage.)

I’d then take it one more step that otherwise remains too implicit: Awesomeness points of doing this isn’t worth the many-times-$5 cost, hence our willingness to consider alternatives that cap the cost.

Few aspects of my Beeminder usage are relevant.

Fake-data is a no-go. Most of my graphs display numbers on Y-axis. An aspect of Beeminder I’ve long under-appreciate is that I accumulate motivation in units of “X units of A by date D.”

On motivating no-fake-data like this…

I’m focusing primarily on “By D, a total of X units of A.” Most of my goals (being of a particular nature) benefit primarily from this. “Having never dipped below bright line” matters much less, if at all.

This focus allows for “borrowing from future” to prevent derails. I have mixed feelings about this. When internal motivation is fueling me, it helps me avoid unnecessary costs while tracking a total of X units of A by D, albeit at lower resolutions. (In the long run this has no impact.) When I’m out of fuel, this is simply path to ruins. I’ll eventually start a fresh goal on the same topic. In the process I’ll lose all “accumulated motivation”.

I wonder whether Beeminder team would ever consider borrowing from future as a feature? (@dreev ?)

Learning how to make sure it’s worth it OR preventing it is valuable. I use Beeminder mostly as a stinging reminder to achieve these. What happened last night stings quite a bit: (1) Some of the goals I derailed on have not delivered $5 value between the previous and this derailment. (2) If I sat down 7 days ago and just added flat spots without guilt, I’d be able to save bucks. I haven’t even tried.

My immediate action has been putting in a(n additional) 7-day flat lines to all derailed goals, starting as early as possible.

In this period, I’d like to look at each and choose:

  • derailment was worth it
    • I most likely ramp up to the rate I left at so I can pursue it into the future.
    • Also consider no-excuses mode for these goals
  • derailment wasn’t worth it

Not sure what to do when it wasn’t worth it. But I’d rather do that explicitly, rather than having to account for that in this process.

I suppose there’s some math magic in the way Beeminder is formulated, that could guide me in choosing this. Perhaps “Was this worth it?” after derailments + some guidance as to how to frame things would be a nice level up for Beeminder?

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