Feature Announcement: The Uncle Button

A bee holding up a surrender flag

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:

You pay your current stakes
Your stakes follow the pledge schedule — up a level or stay put if you’re at your pledge cap
The red line jumps down [1] to today’s datapoint
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:

Before crying uncle

screenshot of graph in the orange with a discontinuity for the derailment

After crying uncle

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.

Screenshot of the uncle button UI. Text: Cry Uncle! Press this button to accept a derailment on this goal, be charged immediately, and get your post-derail respite. This is completely equivalent to ignoring the goal until it derails, except that Beeminder will stop sending you increasingly frantic notifications about it.

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:

You pay your current stakes
Your stakes follow the pledge schedule, up to your pledge cap
The red line jumps up to your datapoint
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:

Illustration of derailing when within epsilon of the bright red line and with zero post-derail respite

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:

How the Uncle Button will work in staircase world

This isn’t imminent and most of you should ignore this whole sidebar, but it’s helpful for ourselves to sanity check new features for how they’ll work in the Platonic ideal version of Beeminder, which includes the Bright Red Staircase.

First, post-derail respite is slightly different in staircase world. In today’s pre-staircase world, we say “zero respite” but we really mean 24 hours of respite. If you derail today, your next beemergency will be tomorrow. Your red line shifts down (technically: shifts in the easy direction) for an extra day of safety buffer.

Literally zero respite isn’t a coherent concept. It’d be like a derailment singularity. Post-derail respite is the user’s answer to the question, “if you persist in doing nothing, how frequently should we charge you?” It’s a strictly positive amount of time.

So in staircase world, clicking the uncle button simply means — besides getting charged and marking the derailment on the graph — that we insert your post-derail respite as a flat spot on the bright red line starting Right Now. Or in the case of Do Less, where post-derail respite is specified by the user in goal units, we insert a vertical jump of that amount.

(Sub-aside with a surprising implication of this for Do Less: Say you have an “at most 1 dessert a day” goal with post-derail respite of 2 desserts and then one day you go nuts and eat a dozen donuts. That puts you at +11 over the red line. Oof. So you derail, get your respite of +2 and, oops, you’re still 9 above the line. So you immediately derail again, get another +2, and, lo, you’re 7 above the line. The cascade continues — 5, 3, 1 — until finally, after 6 instant derailments in a row, you’re finally 1 dessert below the red line. Harsh but fair? You can always adjust your post-derail respite before entering your +12 donuts if you want to squirm out of that ironclad logic.)

In general, the staircase-world uncle button is nothing more nor less than buying respite. If your stakes are $S and your post-derail respite is D days (or G goal units’ worth), crying uncle means paying $S to have D days (G units) of safety buffer inserted immediately in your bright red line.

To avoid confusion, outside of this sidebar respite means pre-staircase respite — one day more than post-staircase respite.

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.