I need a second opinion on legitness

[phi]

@dreev what have you done?!

Seriousness aside, this is A LOT of great input with very diverse views on the subject. Thanks everyone!
If anything it shows that maybe it wasn’t completely unreasonable for me to be so conflicted about what to do.

@zedmango

Especially in this case, where it was her poor planning that put you in a position where the only way to see her was to pay the $30.

I didn’t mean to imply it was poor planning on anyone’s part at all. In fact there was basically 0 planning involved. It was a spontaneously call to meet up if I got time. That’s all there is to it. I could have simply said nope, no time. Like a normal person
I can’t picture myself ever asking someone in such a situation to cover my Beeminder costs. That just feels alien to me. It’s not like she asked for, I dunno, fixing her printer in the middle of the night or something.

@zedmango

It’s something I’ve used before when a girl wants to see me when I need to do a beeminder task instead - “hey, if you really want to see me, you can, but seeing you will cost me $X, so you’ll have to cover that.”

YMMV but outside of work I don’t normally have people queuing up throwing money at me just so they can see me

@dreev

I love it when people … [I accidentally posted this without finishing that sentence because I got distracted digging up an old gem: “[mob justice ](mob justice)”] … was about to say I love it when people pose these conundrums to the community!

Haha! I figured you’d like it Speaking of which, I love both this…

@dreev

https://blog.beeminder.com/barfingcats/

(Hopefully it’s not too insulting that I’m sort of categorizing this as a Barfing Cats Excuse, namely, the kind of thing that feels like a fair excuse but ultimately the point of beeminding your goal was to make sure it would happen despite that kind of excuse. But if you can formulate a not-too-ad-hoc general principle – ideally with a nice bright line for applying it – then you could call it a non-legit derailment!)

…and that title! I’ve grown up with cats, so maybe that’s why.
And this brings me to some other quote of yours, @dreev:

@dreev

Having said all that, here’s an attempt at the other side of this argument:

The true point of a commitment contract is to eliminate akrasia. So anything your long-term self would’ve agreed to, there’s no need to be hard-nosed about. It’s sort of in the spirit of the SOS clause: emergencies or, more generally, truly unexpected circumstances, should be exempted. So if this had been a surprise last-minute trip, it would’ve been in that spirit. The fact that it wasn’t a surprise doesn’t change the equation much (other than making us feel like Merchant got what he deserved for forgetting to adjust his road). He obviously meant to and his long-term self would’ve approved of the exemption, so what’s the harm in pretending he did it?

Man, I’m almost convincing myself! But it’s a dangerously slippery slope – the value of bright lines is huge and “my long-term self totally would’ve been cool with this” is a very dim, fuzzy line!

This is exactly what I had in mind here:

@phi

I consider this non legit because in my book this is something very unexpected and I am convinced this goal will still work great for me even then.

When I set up this goal I was basically living on YouTube and other similar time sinks. This goal helped at combating that. Really well in fact.
Spontaneously meeting up with a deer friend whom I had to dismiss the past 4 times already (as I learned on that evening) is not what this goal was initially set up to combat. That’s where my motivation comes from to classify it as non-legit. At least for me watching just one more video and then I’ll get started is something different than meeting someone.

On the other side, I wondered what would the Beeminder people do in that instance because they arguably have been beeminding for a longer time than me and maybe been in this spot already.
So it was super interesting to read @dreev’s take on this.
And of course reading the war stories of everyone else here who has had a similar struggle is super insightful and reassuring, thanks again!

So as stated in an earlier post, I did barf up the $30. And I realised that $10 was already motivation enough. So now I’m slowly reducing the pledge from $90 back to $10.
And next time I ma either again shell out the $10 or maybe call non legit and dial up the road afterwards for a bit and then take a step back and see if I feel any different about the goal than I did before.

Thanks for reading so far
I want to leave you with two things:

German has the idiom “päpstlicher sein als der Papst” (= to be more catholic than the pope) which crossed my mind a few times during this endeavour.

Beeminder
The Struggle is Real