Allow me to express my horror at that idea: :0
We’d honestly much prefer you reply to the legit check and explain why
it wasn’t a legit derailment and we’ll undo it and stop the charge and
everything (we won’t give you much of a hard time unless you
weaselproofed it). Inaccurate data should feel like apostasy –
anathema to the Way of the Bee. 
Relevant:
There’s also the perhaps self-serving answer that when the pledge is
just $5 it might not be worth the agonizing and the slippery-slope
risk – ie, just cough up the $5 and think of it as a fair price for
all the motivation provided up to that point. More on that way of
thinking here: Be Nice To Yourself | Beeminder Blog
Another way to look at it (taking this from a conversation with a
friend who was having a minor Beeminder existential crisis): Mostly
Beeminder makes you do the awesomeness-maximizing thing, but once in a
while it’s a little off (like forgoing an awesome work spiral in favor
of filing papers which can just as well happen tomorrow). But consider
the awesomeness level without Beeminder. If that’s much, much lower
then it might make sense to live with the small deviations from
Absolute Optimal Awesomeness rather than risk neutering Beeminder’s
motivational power, the thing keeping you at near-optimal awesomeness.
That was way over-verbose. Trying that again: Just do what Beeminder
tells you because if you start deviating from that (even with
sometimes good excuses) then you could end up not listening to
Beeminder at all, which is much worse.
More relevant thoughts…
Jill’s Rule and the Power of Bright Lines; Or, Beeminder’s No-Free-Lunch Theorem
What I said to a user recently who thought our hardnosery (like with
that $1000 UVI payout) was ludicrous, we’re 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 you’ve astutely identified. But we gradually came to the
conclusion that such leniencies necessarily backfire. We now refer
to this amongst ourselves as “Jill’s Rule”. The reason is that you
have to spell out exactly what the leniency is – necessary when real
money is at stake. But then once you’ve done that you’ve just defined
a new edge to skate. Like maybe up to 3 misses per month are
allowable. Well, I’m akratic, so I’m 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, I’m
actually making it more likely I’ll derail because I’ll know there
is leniency and I’ll 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 “paying $1000 to a user for
missing one day in an otherwise superhuman, perfect trend is
ludicrous” and the reason is a fascinating case of game-theoretic
deduction. Suppose we agreed that that was ludicrous: then that
“otherwise superhuman, perfect trend” 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 didn’t 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 wouldn’t be able use the same trick to trick
ourselves into another 1000 days of superhuman awesomeness.
Also related: Catch-up Unmustered; or, Easier is Harder | Beeminder Blog and the concept of Schelling Fences
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Kenny Yang yangkennyk@gmail.com wrote:
Today was a busy day and I wasn’t able to hit my goals before midnight. They
were all daily goals so letting it go past midnight would derail me.Since I’m 100% certain that I’m going to do the remaining goals, I simply
put the value in so I wouldn’t derail.How do you handle these situations?
Thanks!
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http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com