predeterminedness

[Alice]

knowing that all the ping times are predetermined by a prng and that the tagtime program always knows when the next ping is seems to be really fucking with my system 1 >.<

it breaks the feeling that "oh, a ping could happen any minute" because in reality i am often in a multiple-hour gap between pings, and so the next ping might actually be multiple hours from now

does anyone have thoughts on how to make this feel better?

[Daniel Reeves]

Interesting, I've never had that problem, even in an early version of
tagtime where it actually stored the upcoming ping time in a .nextping
file. I've just always taken it as a fundamental tenet of TagTime that
the next ping could happen *at any moment* so you have to put yourself
in that mindset. Which is effectively true as long as you don't peek
or cheat in any way.

Paul Fenwick recently suggested that he might peek to find out if I
was going to derail on my bmndr.com/d/meta goal -- current probability
of that happening tonight = .3% -- so he'd know whether to be ready to
pounce on blog.beeminder.com/blogdog [1] and collect my pledge. I told
him I'd be seriously upset if he violated the sanctity of TagTime's
randomness like that! :) (And I would very much think of that as
cheating even if I didn't peek myself since I could theoretically read
his body language or infer things from his reaction or lack of
reaction.)

So, yeah, just put yourself in the mindset that no human may ever
compute or be privy to the next ping time.

It's a funny philosophical problem though, I admit. But just like you
probably don't let the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics
impact your day-to-day decision making (even if you believe it 100%
intellectually) I think you can not let the technical non-randomness
of TagTime influence you.


[1] Ha, such irony, I got pinged while typing the URL of our dogfood
post. I wasn't sure how I was going to tag the time answering this
email but since it was reminding people about our dogfood goal, I'm
counting it as beeminder time!

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Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com