It should be, but I've never tried it with a ping gap other than 45 minutes! The way to find out is to count the actual number of pings in your tagtime log that have the relevant tags on a given day. Your beeminder datapoint for that day should be gap/3600 hours, where gap is the ping gap specified in your tagtime settings (45*60 by default).
Oh, and do a git pull if you haven't since last week or so -- at one time it was in fact hardcoded for 45 minutes.
Actually, looking more carefully, beeminder is calculating accurately for an average of 25 minutes per ping.
Tagtime however got enthusiastic last night - while it pinged me normally for most of the night, it pinged eight times in the hour between 4 and 5 AM.
Beeminder then (reasonably) put me down for an extra hour of sleep that I didn't actually get.
Them's the breaks when dealing with randomised polling!
Yeah, the tagtime integration is super sketchy. It does let you update anyone else's tagtime graph but if that happens before we get API keys worked out, it's all undoable. The master copy of your data for a tagtime graph is your tagtime log.
Definitely let us know if there's any vandalism or anything going on and we'll clamp down right away. There are just very few tagtime users so far (it being a perl script, and of course the whole concept being a little nutty, cf http://messymatters.com/tagtime ) so it hasn't been an issue. We adore beeminder/tagtime integration ourselves -- like for http://beeminder.com/d/meta -- but the tagtime part is really for hackers only right now.
Btw, we also added a 24-hour delay before charging anyone's credit card so in case someone loses for any kind of technical reason (someone screwing with your graph, beeminder bug, or even your own extenuating circumstances a la http://blog.beeminder.com/sos ) you won't lose. I guess I mentioned that in another comment. To further repeat, we'd refund a spurious charge regardless, but then we'd have to eat a small fee, so better to catch it before that.
A fundamental tenet of Beeminder is: no one ever loses money on a technicality. If you go off your yellow brick road it should be because your akrasia was more powerful than the amount of money you had at risk.
I have a bit of confusion about tagtime too (I have already sent you an email, actually):
It is possible to alter the average poll time for tagtime - the default is 45 minutes and I have changed this to 25 minutes.
Will this poll period alteration be recognised by Beeminder? Beeminder does seem to be over-reporting time spent on activities so far...
As for dropping out of other religious communities, well, they're the quintessential bad guys, right? Not only do they believe in all kinds of unsubstantiated woo, they suck you into a dense network of personal relationships -- which we at Less Wrong want earnestly to re-create, just, you know, without any of the religion stuff.
Churches have art. I like art.
There is a meme on Less Wrong, though, that rationalist communities are not just better-suited to the unique needs of rationalists, but also better in general...back off of your pleasurable belief that rationality is better than other belief systems.
I think "better in general" is a stand in for a lot of specific things that can be better or worse. I shouldn't expect one action to help according to every metric.
...if your answer to the challenges of life is to self-medicate, you're taking on a whole lot more risk than the present maturity of the discipline of rationality would seem to warrant.
Rationality, the gateway drug.
...quitting religion offer excellent rewards now, but may involve heavy costs down the road.
Words fail me.
I think the "heavy costs" of quitting religion referred to are the documented differences in health outcomes based on membership (or lack thereof) of religious communities:
"Even if we have good reason to assert that mainstream religious thinking is flawed, maybe we should be slower to advise people to give up the health benefits (footnote 15) of belonging, emotionally, to one or another religious community."
I don't assume Quine to be any different from anyone else in recognizing his influences.
It is because I have no particular confidence in anyone recognizing their own influences that I turn to timing to help me answer the question of independent creation.
1) If a person is the first person to give public expression to an idea, then the chance is relatively high that he is the originator of the idea. It's not completely certain, but it's relatively high.
2) In contrast, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but is, say, the 437th person to do so, the first having done so fifty years before, then chances are relatively high that he picked up the idea from somewhere and didn't remember picking it up. The fact that nobody expressed the idea before fifty years earlier suggests that the idea is pretty hard to come up with independently, because had it been easy, people would have been coming up with it all through history.
3) Finally, if a person is not the first person to give public expression to an idea but people have been giving public expression to the idea for as long as we have records, then the chance is relatively high once again that he independently rediscovered the idea, since it seems to be the sort of idea that is relatively easy to rediscover independently.
The fact that nobody expressed the idea before fifty years earlier suggests that the idea is pretty hard to come up with independently, because had it been easy, people would have been coming up with it all through history.
This can be true, but it is also possible that an idea may be hard to independently develop because the intellectual foundations have not yet been laid.
Ideas build on existing understandings, and once the groundwork has been done there may be a sudden eruption of independent-but-similar new ideas built on those foundations. They were only hard to come up with until that time.
What would be even more interesting would be to do a time-series. When do human infants have peak cuteness?
As a fairly observant and (as far as I can tell) realistic parent, I have noticed that both of my children have (up to their current ages of four years and 19 months) had several peak periods for cuteness. So far they have had peaks centred at the same ages: 5 months, 15 months and (oldest only so far) 3 years.
This is not to say that they are not cute at any other ages, but at these ages they have been radiantly, eye-wateringly cute.
My response to some respondents' question of why the agent needs the evaluation-of-options stage before acting is simple: the evaluation of options is part of the deterministic process which produces the action!
If the agent did not evaluate the options, it would be a different agent and thus act differently - possibly less optimally for its own utility function.
Isn't this why we want to be rational?
(Apologies if I am missing the point!)
A great post - I love the quantity and quality of information you have squeezed into such a compact article.
I will be seeing how the recommendations work for me over the next week or so.
Thanks!
Melbourne, Australia
Hello! You have another victim via MoR.
I am already a bit conflicted about the site - I am finding the content inspiring, useful and helpful, given that I am going through a bit of a life 'directional re-evaluation' at the moment, but it is also sucking away a lot of time that I could be devoting to actual analysis and practical action...
Oh, well, when I finish reading every post, I can carry on from there!
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I just have to say thanks for a great tool for managing my akrasia!
It is too early to say that the effects will last long-term, but Beeminder has genuinely given me a boost towards doing the things I want-to-do-but-keep-putting-aside-just-for-the-moment in a way that nothing else has for a long time.
It has also made very clear which things I want to do but put off (on which activity is rapidly diverging from the yellow brick road in a positive direction) and the things I don't want to do but have to (which are still in the safe zone, but are not running away from the YBR at all...).