mob justice

You have a public record of having done the work before midnight and you
updated the graph during the update buffer. I personally feel you should be
safe. The public record is the thing that settles it for me, rather than
getting the data in by 3am. I think I see recording the data as part of the
task, so if you haven’t done that by midnight tough bikkies. In this case,
tweeting counts as recording the data but this interpretation may be biased
due to my incorrect understanding that the UVI graph was generated from the
twitter data.

Yeah, the most ridiculous aspect of this is that we’ve been manually
updating the UVI goal this whole time. Though lately I’ve kind of
liked that because we often painstakingly craft the tweets to convey
what exactly the UVI was but then in the datapoint comment I use
something succinct like “jawbone soft launch” or “let my infinibee
rest” that immediately conveys (to us) what the UVI was in a few
words.

Btw, if we do cough up this $1000 it will have been worth it about 100
times over. Even aside from the commitment device, it’s super handy
for looking up what happened when, like when we compose monthly emails
and whatnot. Or even for debugging sometimes. In theory we have the
git history but that’s too cumbersome and noisy.

I intend to make a big deal out of the milestone next month of 1000
UVIs and how every startup should have a public changelog and commit
to changing it every day (on average).

Anyway, I’m going with the consensus on whether we cough up this
$1000. So far, including the blog commenters, it looks like we have 2
siding with Beeminder and 1 siding with Somervta (not counting those
of us with huge conflicts of interest). Now I better go figure out
tonight’s UVI so this isn’t moot! (Actually, a derailment tonight
would be entirely separate. Even if yesterday is deemed a derailment I
hereby affirm that another $1000 is at stake tonight – no flat spot
or anything.)

I side with Beeminder on this, based on facts that:

  • you did the UVI on time
  • you posted about it to Twitter on time

In my eyes you are fully compliant with current Goal statement: “One UVI
per day as logged at twitter.com/beemuvi”. Lacking further fine print, it’s
the end of story, because Beeminder is all about behavior change - it’s
reality that counts, not data points in graph. It’s fair being fair also to
yourself…

Surely, improvements are possible

  • IFTTT.com integration
  • specify more details in fine print

I guess we’ll call this an official consensus. Thanks so much everyone! (I really was ready to pay it, btw.) Keep an eye on blog.beeminder.com/blogdog – Bethany and I are both traveling next week [1] which always bumps the probability of derailment way up.

[1] People in New York, let us know if you want to meet or would want to join if we managed to arrange a Beeminder meetup! There may also still be a spot left in the workshop Bethany’s presenting at – rationality.org – plus I’m setting something up as part of fullstackacademy.com that some of you may like.