The Data-Driven Life

theodp recommends a somewhat long and rambling article by Wired's Gary Wolf, writing in the NY Times Magazine, on recording and mining data about your personal life. "In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The imposition on oneself of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. And until a few years ago, it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. But now, technology can analyze every quotidian thing that happened to you today. 'Four things changed,' explains Wolf. 'First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.' And the next thing you know, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed."

Comments

Rise of the Many-to-Many

[BlueBoxSW.com]

I see it as a rise of the Many-to-Many relationship.

Amazon suggestions, Netflix movies. Facebook.

The many-to-many relationship, long overlooked in database construction because of the complexities it brings with it, has now come onto it's own and is changing our lives.

Re:Rise of the Many-to-Many

[the_humeister]

I make it a point to disseminate misinformation about me. That's one of the main things I learned watching DS9 (especially with regard to Elim Garak).

Re:Rise of the Many-to-Many

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't follow.

These connections can be made without any user input. You visit a product while logged in to a site, record made. Then you visit another, another record made. Connection between the two products is also made, the products can now show up on a "you may also like.. " list. No need for AJAX or other buzzcronyms.

Re:Rise of the Many-to-Many

[dnwq]

So... did you really watch DS9? ;)

Re:Rise of the Many-to-Many

[CODiNE]

I make it a point to disseminate misinformation about me.

Whoah... is that like "This sentence is a lie." Those things always confused me.

*stares at navel* ..

*clicks submit*

Re:Rise of the Many-to-Many

[Yvan256]

"Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"
"My dear Doctor, they're all true."
"Even the lies?"
"Especially the lies."
- Garak and Bashir (DS9: "The Wire")

the pythagoreans called

[FuckingNickName]

they want their rationality back...

Re:the pythagoreans called

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Funny story. The Pythagoreans in fact believed(religiously) that all numbers were in fact rational; that is very number can be expressed as a/b, where a and b are integers. When a mathematician called Hippasus proved (using the Pythagorean theorem) that the square root of 2 was irrational, the Pythagorean were so offended, they killed him.

Having digressed, I will return to the topic at hand by saying that most people often for get that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that you should. Just because we now have the technology to tag, monitor, follow and record everyone at all times, it is not necessarily going to be good for anyone if we do so.

This and many similar suggestions are based on what Edmund Burke--writing in the wake of the French Revolution--called "levelling reason". Without some kind of grounding; without a philosophical or moral compass, people and societies can lose their way particularly when enabled by new technologies. Ridiculous ideas and notions, contrary to all prior reason, are lauded as rational, neccessary and beneficial developments and will indeed may appear as such especially to those devoid of any real education or philosophical grounding. Unfortunately, this group now encompasses the majority of those entrusted with making decisions in society, as well as their backers. No one listens to calm thinkers anymore; everyone just listens to PR men.

We are turning into the society Burke feared. One dominated by emotive, shallow views which applies naive levelling reason to all problems it encounters. This is why our prisons are filling up as crime goes down; why our internet is being censored even as our society becomes more tolerant; why our politics becomes more polarised even as our political parties become more homogeneous. And it is why we seek to gather vast, unprecedented amounts of data about ourselves without bothering to really try and use it, or to consider the consequences of doing so.

For most stories like this, despite the modern age and technologies involved, ninety percent of these--usually negative--consequences can be discovered by a simple reading of Aesop's Fables. Not that anyone--particularly the people who report them--will bother to. As a society, uur reasoning remains at a primary school level and rationality is something we can only apply to numbers, not ourselves.

Don't feel a need to share

[Concerned Onlooker]

I have not joined the need-to-share-everything-about-my-life-with-the-world bandwagon. In fact, I have taken steps backward, such as deactivating my Facebook account (good luck trying to actually delete your account). In the data-driven future I plan to be Blank Reg (look it up). Or possibly a new riff on Luddite could be applied to people like me. Social-site Luddite?

Of course, the article is about much more than that and it's very interesting, but that's just my mini-rant.

Re:Don't feel a need to share

[Daniel Dvorkin]

TFA actually talks very little about sharing your data with others (FB etc.) It's about collecting data on yourself, and using that data for your own purposes. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who do this also tend to be people who blog compulsively about their personal lives, but you could certainly do one without the other.

Article needs a course in experimental design

[LockeOnLogic]

Each little personal anecdote in the article makes my inner statistician scream.

Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost.

Lookie! I made a graph and it shows something! It MUST be causation, there is no other explanation.

Re:Article needs a course in experimental design

[vux984]

Lookie! I made a graph and it shows something! It MUST be causation, there is no other explanation.

He made a graph. That's more than most people do. And yes, its enough to move from 'anecdote' to 'supporting data'. Is it enough to make a general conclusion about the effect of coffee on society? No. Is it enough to make a limited conclusion about the effect of coffee on him? Still no.

But is it enough to suggest maybe he should continue avoiding coffee? Sure. Why not?

Re:Article needs a course in experimental design

[Daniel Dvorkin]

So if you wanted to know the effect of coffee intake on your productivity -- not the population in general, but you personally; remember that caffeine is a drug to which many people react idiosyncratically -- how would you suggest designing the experiment? Speaking as a fellow statistician, I'd say it sounds like the guy's doing the best he can with what he's got to work with.

Re:Article needs a course in experimental design

[dangitman]

It's the authors use of phrases like "good data set", "objective analysis", and "the data had delivered a verdict" that anger me.

If that's enough to anger you, may I suggest laying off the coffee?

Re:Article needs a course in experimental design

[John Hasler]

> So if you wanted to know the effect of coffee intake on your productivity --
> not the population in general, but you personally; remember that caffeine is
> a drug to which many people react idiosyncratically -- how would you suggest
> designing the experiment?

Buy a can of decaf, a can of regular, and two containers. Label one container "A" and one "B". Have an assistant put the decaf in one and the regular in the other out of your sight and record which is which without letting you see the record. Toss a coin and swap the labels if it comes up heads without letting the assitant see whether you do so or not. Record this, without letting the assistant see. Now no one knows which container has the regular. Drink coffee from "A" for six weeks, recording whatever objective measures you are interested in. Switch to "B" and repeat. Do this three or four times. Analyze your data for systematic differences between "A" and "B". Now compare your assitant's record of which container she put the regular in with your record of whether or not you swapped the labels to determine which data pertains to regular and which to decaf.

Re:Article needs a course in experimental design

[AndrewBC]

Experiment log, day 1:
Slapped assistant for taking too long hiding the coffee; Assistant left. Drinking blend of both. It's the only way to be sure.

Experiment conclusions:
I need my coffee.

How retarded.

[sudog]

"Superintelligence" known as the cloud?

There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."

There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.

Re:How retarded.

[Trepidity]

Indeed, it seems the most likely effect is that, if the data-collection becomes easy, they'll outsource the data-analysis to someone else. It won't be empowering people to make decisions about their own lives with more information than they had before. Rather, it'll just strengthen the tendency many people already have to abdicate responsibility for their own lives, and expect someone else to tell them what they should do. In this glorious future, they can collect a bunch of data about all aspects of their life, and someone will tell them what they're doing right/wrong, and what they should change.

Huh

[Quiet_Desperation]

How about pretentious writing about the future. Is anyone tracking that?

Easy

[LockeOnLogic]

Ask the megacloud to track the writing pretention quotient rate of change across social networking superintelligence thegoogle synergy.

Vernor Vinge science fiction

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

This idea is in Vinge's work. A group called the Friends of Privacy tries to dilute the flood of accurate information about people by spreading erroneous information, making net searches on people less useful.

Summary is very misleading

[AthanasiusKircher]

From the quotation given, you might think TFA was about "the cloud" and sharing data in it. It's not, despite the fact that many posts in response seem to think it is.

Basically, the article is about people who collect data about their own lives and then analyze it. Most of the anecdotes given in the article have nothing to do with online communities, media, etc. If you're a person who has tracked your finances, weight, exercise, etc., you know what this is. The anecdotes give some more extreme versions of this tendency to collect data and analyze things about one's own life.

There is some reflection on how more people can do this now with greater ease because technology facilitates it -- both in data collection and in data representation/analysis. But the "sharing," mobile devices, "social media," "cloud," and such stuff mentioned in the summary quote are barely addressed elsewhere in the article... except as vehicles for personal (i.e., primarily private) data collection.