EEP!
PROBLEM?
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If you do 1 second worth of cleaning you build up some buffer for tomorrow.
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Make it an āintegeryā goal and youāll never see these kinds of problems?
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I donāt think integery would interact very well with it being counted in hours. If Beetimerdroid counted in seconds instead of hours I would integery them all in a heartbeat.
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Tee hee! Thatās how the math worked out. What did you want us to do??
Actually I recall someone contesting a derailment because of something like this once. Iāll paste my response here, but I know Iām preaching to the choir in your case and you just happily did your fraction of a second of cleaning.
Hi [redacted]! Bethany says I should try you as a sounding board for my crazy
ideas about brightness of lines. Iāve been jotting down notes about
cases like this for a future blog post and would love to get your
thoughts, either in general or as applies to this particular caseā¦(I think the short version of the wall of text below is that ever
taking a āclose enoughā attitude to a beeminder derailment does a
surprising amount of damage to the future efficacy of beeminder, for
slippery slope type reasons)What I said to a user recently who thought our hardnosery (like with
that $1000 UVI payout ā 1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements | Messy Matters ) was ludicrous, weāre
only humans, etc:A few years ago when we were getting started, we experimented heavily
with grace periods and 3-strikes policies and other ways to solve the
problem that youāve astutely identified. But we gradually came to the
conclusion that such leniencies necessarily backfire. Itās like a
No-Free-Lunch Theorem. The reason is that you have to spell out
exactly what the leniency is ā necessary when real money is at stake.
But then once youāve done that youāve just defined a new edge to
skate. Like maybe up to 3 misses per month are allowable. Well, Iām
akratic, so Iām going to squander those 3 freebees early in the month
and be right back where I started.And worse, unless I understand exactly how the freebees work, Iām
actually making it more likely Iāll derail because Iāll know there
is leniency and Iāll push things as far as I can which means I can
accidentally push them too far. So it turns out to be superior in
every way to just make the road itself less steep but then hard-commit
to staying on it, with no wiggle room. Another way to say it: the
yellow brick road has to be a bright line.Finally, I very much disagree about āpaying $1000 to a user for
missing one day in an otherwise superhuman, perfect trend is
ludicrousā and the reason is a fascinating case of game-theoretic
deduction. Suppose we agreed that that was ludicrous: then that
āotherwise superhuman, perfect trendā could never have happened! It
was only because the $1000 was hanging over our head every day like a
sword of damocles that we were motivated to be so superhuman. And it
worked, for over 1000 days. And then one day it didnāt and we paid up.
Totally worth $1000 for that 1000 days of superhuman awesomeness. If
there was a way to argue our way out of paying up then the whole point
would be defeated and we wouldnāt be able use the same trick to trick
ourselves into another 1000 days of superhuman awesomeness.
[Notice that weāre now most of the way to those next 1000 days of UVIs! :)]
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I sure did!
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