I feel the main issue is being able to disable it at anytime. I also feels like it goes against the “Akrasia Horizon”. As you can simply just turn it off right before a derail. Maybe at least not allow it to be turned off 24 hours before a derail to prevent turning it off to avoid a derail. Also I miss being able to to turn on Weasel proofing to prevent myself from ending a goal in the first week. What are others thoughts on this?
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There was some off-site discussion at Will we (Beeminder) deem it prudent to make it harder to turn No-Excuses Mode back off after you opt in to it? | Manifold.
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Ah, thanks both of you! Yeah, we agonized about that for a while and then kind of concluded the status quo was good enough, but happy to revisit! Let me quote the opening of that Manifold market:
So far we’ve just made it show in the interface and in the legit check / derailment notification emails how long you’ve had No-Excuses Mode turned on or when you last turned it off. Presumably that adds a bit of disincentivizing shame to the loophole of quickly turning it back off when you’re about to derail.
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Odd thing is shame usually works pretty well for me. But for some reason in this instance it doesn’t seem to work. I believe I’ve done turn off before derail several times. I definitely understand the thought process though.
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Any chance it will work now? I mean, now that you’ve publicly said you’ve having this problem with it, so if a support workerbee were to see that “NO-EXCUSES MODE: disengaged at…” it would be tantamount to “I AM WEASELING”.
I don’t know if we have the infrastructure to keep track of the following but you could even explicitly declare right here that support should disregard the “disengaged at” for you and treat no-excuses mode as still on if it was ever turned on, unless you give us a week notice on changing your mind.
If enough people wanted that, we’d probably go ahead and akrasia-proof it properly.
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That’s fair probably would be more effective now.
I do like the idea of a proper “akrasia-proof”. But as much as want I could see a problem occurring with it. The main one being that feel it would lead to is people agreeing with it but then an emergency pops up and they would message support anyways.
Leading to no excuses mode becoming weasel proofing as they would probably try to provide proof of said major emergency. As I could then see newer users complaining that their money was taken and they were refused a refund. Where the current setup they could just disable it in a major emergency and if they were asked about it they could explain why they it disabled. Probably leads to less anger for people who don’t quite understand it.
Let me know if what I am saying doesn’t make since my thoughts often come out in an unorganized manner.
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i’m not fully on board with this. one reason i don’t use no excuses mode is that i thought it is clear for everyone that it’s a final commitment, and people basically agree to still be charged if their house burns down, which always seemed ridiculous to me.
maybe i’m misunderstanding it. but just as an observer, it would make absolute sense to akrasia-proof it. it’s called NO excuses mode, not ALMOST NO excuses mode. (which is why, among other reasons, i don’t use it.)
i don’t know if newbees complaining would be a significant issue. do many new users opt into new excuses mode? i deliberately never did, and since you have to go find it in the settings my gut feeling says not many newbees opt in either, but obviously i have no idea what i’m talking about.
just my two cents, please feel free to ignore them (since i never saw the appeal of no excuses mode in the first place).
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Chewing on all this; thanks, y’all!
Btw, here’s our pitch for No-Excuses Mode:
We’re kind of arguing that “why should I pay if it wasn’t my fault?” is the wrong mentality. Or, not wrong, and there are definitely different legit ways to use Beeminder. But we’re pitching a different mentality in that blog post. Some people are into it!
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thanks for linking the blog post! reassures me that this absolutely isn’t for me XD
if the original reason still stands, that akrasia proofing no excuses mode is unnecessary because it’s not for weasels, it’s for the most hardcore beeminder users, then that also doesn’t really make sense to me.
supposedly once you’re a most hardcore beeminder user, you don’t ever turn into a softcore beeminder user again, so why can this feature be turned off on a whim? :p
I think this is fixed now in that it doesn’t disengage for a week. But it would be nice to say “Don’t let me disengage until this custom date.”
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Maybe it only happens on newer goals? I was able to enable and then disable right afterwards.
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Oh! Yeah if it’s been less than a week since you made the goal, I think that’s normal. Not sure if there’s a way to turn off the one-week-trial kind of thing.
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Just kidding, I guess I remembered it wrong? It looks in the docs like you can just turn it off… I don’t have anything I want to risk turning it on for right now to test. I thought I remembered having to wait last time but maybe not?
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So is this fixed now? or can you just turn off weaselproofing (aka no-excuses mode) at any time, which completely defeats its purpose?
I so declare this. Support should disregard any “disengaged at” and treat weaselproofing (aka no-excuses mode) as still on unless I’ve given a week notice.
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I’m interested in something like this declaration as well…
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The no excuses mode lacks teeth if it can just be turned off at any point. If it’s meant for hardcore users, then just bury it in the settings with lots of warnings. I just tested it out and doesn’t seem very hardcore if you can turn it off in one click at any point…
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