Feature Announcement: The Uncle Button

Users have been lobbying for this feature for years. Finally we threw in the towel and implemented it.

Hitting the Uncle Button (crying uncle) means accepting a derailment before the clock runs out. This is actually kind of critical to let users do and it’s silly it took us so long. I mean, for starters, if people want to give us money, we should let them. But why do they want to? Well, Beeminder revenue is proportional to user awesomeness. Derailing is a calculated risk and sometimes a calculated choice. We want it to be hard to derail inadvertently but easy to derail intentionally. An uncle button encourages a derailing-it-is-nailing-it mindset. It’s also eminently practical from a user perspective: you need to focus on the beemergencies you’re actually going to dispatch. Getting reminders for something you know you’re not going to do is quite bad: it’s spammy and desensitizes you to Beeminder reminders. (As a bonus, reduced zeno polling helps keep our spam scores low.) But mainly, again, it’s just something users really, really wanted.

So here’s what happens when you cry uncle:

1. You pay your current stakes
2. Your stakes follow the pledge schedule — up a level or stay put if you’re at your pledge cap
3. The red line jumps down [1] to today’s datapoint
4. Your amount of post-derail respite is inserted as a flat spot starting today.

Here is an example for a goal that has a respite of zero:

The key is that this results in the same bright red line you would have had if you’d just let the derail happen. In particular, you’ll never lose safety buffer by hitting the uncle button. (Well, almost never. See the Do Less section.)

What if you already have safety buffer?

Currently, for the initial launch of this feature, we just don’t let you cry uncle unless you’re in the red. Logically, though, and perhaps in reality in the future if users want this, the above steps can all still be applied. If you cry uncle when you already have safety buffer, step 3 is a no-op — your datapoint is above the red line. Which means you’re just paying your current pledge to have whatever your post-derail respite is inserted as additional safety buffer. If you already have a full akrasia horizon’s worth of safety buffer, only then does it not make logical sense to be able to press the uncle button. No need to pay for more respite at that point since you can just insert it yourself using breaks, or the graph editor.

(Or we could say that you can’t use the uncle button to get more than a respite’s worth. That prevents any accidental pressing of the uncle button twice in a row. You can always temporarily increase your post-derail respite to buy as much respite as you want in one shot.)

But, again, for now crying uncle is for beemergency days only.

Find this in the Stop/Pause tab below your graph

Do Less goals

This all works mostly as expected for Do Less goals. If you’ve eaten more cookies than you were allowed today and have no way to un-eat a cookie, crying uncle makes a ton of sense and the sensible thing will happen:

1. You pay your current stakes
2. Your stakes follow the pledge schedule, up to your pledge cap
3. The red line jumps up to your datapoint
4. The red line jumps up an additional amount equal to your post-derail respite

Recall that post-derail respite is specified in goal units — cookies in this example — for a Do Less goal, rather than number of days.

What if you’ve entered no data for the day and are in the red on a Do Less goal because the Pessimistic Presumptive Report (PPR) is going to derail you? We still let you cry uncle. The difference is that in step 3 the red line conceptually jumps down to your datapoint in step 3 before jumping back up by the amount of your post-derail respite. Potentially, depending on what you have your respite set to, this means that crying uncle without having entered any data yet could reduce your distance to the bright red line. So probably you should enter an explicit datapoint on a Do Less goal before hitting the uncle button.

(Aside: should there be an uncle button API endpoint? Would you brilliant bumbleheads use that?)

Caveats, concerns, and arcana

Say you’re a novelist with a Do More goal to write a thousand words a day and you’re three words shy of the bright red line but you’ve hit a wall and literally can’t write another word. You hit the uncle button. Also your post-derail respite is set to zero. What do you expect to happen? By the current algorithm, you’ll derail and the red line will continue from your current datapoint, as in the dotted red line here:

Arguably more principled is for the red line to become the dotted blue line. That way the derailment buys you exactly 24 hours of safety buffer. The difference is whether you’ll have a full day’s worth of work — a thousand words to write — for the subsequent beemergency or whether you’ll have the same measly three words due that you had due today when you derailed. Typically users want the full thousand words due — that’s what they probably had in mind when choosing “zero respite” — so we’re not going to lose sleep over this just yet but in principle, the more generous version is probably better. You could always ratchet the red line to get the full thousand words’ worth if you wanted that.

In case that wasn’t enough arcana, we’ll leave you with this sidebar about how crying uncle will work in the farther future:

PS: Huge thanks to Philip Hellyer for coining the term “Uncle! button” way back in 2015 in the forum.

Footnotes

[1] Technically it jumps in the negative-yaw (harder) direction. For simplicity we generally talk about the common case of Do More goals rather than keep everything fully general.