Slashdot Mirror
The Numbers of a Life
porsche911 points out a recent post by Stephen Wolfram in which he plots out data on his communication habits collected over a period of years — or in some cases, decades. He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day. It provides some interesting correlations and insights into the structure of a person's life, and how that structure shifts over the years. He says,
"What is the future for personal analytics? There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting 'stories' from personal data. And in time I'm looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions. As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."
If ((age IS GREATER THAN 25) & (number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN (age-16)) || number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN number-of-times-starwars-seen)
{
Loser = true;
}
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"As personal analytics develops, itâ(TM)s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."
Here's a clue - if that would "give a whole new dimension to experiencing your life", you need to step away from the keyboard and get a life!.
At first glance, the whole idea of personal analytics seems kind of worthless. But imagine comparing analytics among populations and drawing correlations between habits, lifestyle choices, and diseases. That could be a helpful step toward the kind of preventative health care we need as a people. Lifestyle choices matter a lot more than the strictly-retroactive fix-me-up-after-my-heart-clogs-up-with-french-fry-grease healthcare that much of the US and I'm sure other countries seem to encourage.
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
I find this fascinating. What I find even more fascinating is how can the man sustain such a momentus amount of activity while maintaining a family? Seriously, he works every waking hour of every day, with no interruption of email activity except dinner and sleep... Where does his family fit in? In my case, my wife won't let me, so perhaps this is just my unique situation. Anyone else have commentary on family life vs work/passion life?
Don't talk about life. Don't analyze life. And most importantly, don't view your own life from a 3rd person perspective 24/7. Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time. If you're having to think about your life all the time, it means your not living it. And if you're not living it, do something about it. Don't just sit on the sidelines.
Life is not for the lazy.
I hated this idea when Doctorow introduced me to it as "Reflective Analytics":
http://www.tor.com/stories/2008/08/weak-and-strange
It's meta-mental-masturbation. Exactly the kind of thing he would write about.
This is pretty sweet. I'll bet you could get all sorts of insight about a life in this fashion. But what are the chances that (the average) someone will be able to gather this data and run the analysis and then keep the resulting insight under their own control? What are the chances that this data could be used by a person to improve their quality of life, as opposed to used by a corporation to more effectively vacuum up the money and utility people shed?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Did you want to say USa? Because, this is the guy who is more interested in your insides, and who is willing to abuse you....
Sure, my memory will fail me in the future (it's already crap now), but I'm okay with that. If I were living in a time where this sort of detailed breakdown and analysis were applied to everyone, I'd much rather forget things and not understand the reasons behind events 100% than have a database of every little detail of my life in it for anyone who'd pay to check it out. If one guy decides to do it for himself, I guess that's cool for him. But when you take this idea to its logical conclusion and start applying this to large groups of people, it sounds much too like Big Brother for me to be comfortable with at all.
It also strikes me as the most likely way people would wind up living in some sort of Orwellian, totalitarian state. At first, they'll tell us of all the benficial things this could give us, and phase it in gradually. They might tell us of how it could help medicine, and we agree to let them start monitoring our food and drink consumption, along with our exercise habits. And when something good, such as a cure for some difficult to vanquish disease, comes as a result, people will see that it provided them some tangible benefit this time. And from there it will slowly bleed out into other areas of life. This slow, creeping invasion of privacy strikes me as a much more likely route to such a future than such a government having a revolution and things changing overnight.
Personal analytics on large populations will ultimately suffer from the same problem so many schemes involving information and power do. If it happens, we'll probably have welcomed it for the perceived benefits to society we can get from it on a small scale, naively believing individuals in positions of power will be benevolent rulers. Most people will act shocked when this power is abused and steadily has its limits expanded. The rest of us will sit down and say, "When we were talking about this happening 20 years ago, we were the conspiracy nutjobs, eh? I'd say I told you so and leave you to deal with it, but instead I'll thank you for screwing me over too."
OCD much? Seriously, who keeps track of this kind of stuff?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
100 million key strokes? I hope for his carpel tunnel's sake that he has an IBM Model M.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I think it is safe to say that this data could be considered Facebook porn.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
The plot of episode 3 details how a mans life is effectively ruined by perfect recall*.
Forgetting all the fun of interesting stats generated by this Wolfram project, is that what you want?
Peace,
Andy.
* spoiler alert for those of you who have not watched this brilliant series
The blog post is much longer, and there is much more analysis than real, meaningful, useful results. So many numbers and pretty graphs, but no conclusions: what is good, what should change, what is bad, what should not change.
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
What if your life is all about keeping track of your life?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It mostly tells me that collecting all this data is pretty useless. I've accumulated a lot of data myself, but never got around to analyzing it. Now I won't bother.
This is fascinating if for no other reason than to compare against my own workday. It's quite evident that this guy's day starts at roughly 10am and ends by about 3pm. So on average 5 hours of work per day. I wish my work day looked like that, even if it meant meant some work on the weekends.
And what is it exactly that he has accomplished with this? He's certainly a succesful businessman, but what in this article is actually supposed to impress me with its pioneering vision? This man has meticulously documented the minutiae of his day to day life for years and years, then taken this data and produced graphs which tell us...not much of anything, actually. We can tell he wakes up and goes to sleep at largely the same times most days, and also eats dinner at the same time. But please, I'm just an ignorant plebian, share some of your knowledge with me and reveal how he has documented something profound.
As I said in another post, cool for him if he wants to do this with his life. Hope he has fun with it, and I wouldn't do it myself. But he's simply built a great amount of data about absolutely mundane tasks. Possibly the single interesting thing you could glean from what he published was being able to see how his book came together. That aside, he just obsessively compiled data on how he performed tasks that millions of people do everyday. I can't help but feel like the only reason why this seems like such an awesome, world-changing idea to him is because it's his data. You probably don't care how many sheets of toilet paper I use in a typical year, and I don't care how many emails you sent between 6AM-8AM on average for the month of May in 1993. This guy has done some impressive stuff with his life, but I don't think this is one of them.
"casualties from falling meteors are rare. . .0.0000001 persons per minute die that way"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Google, Facebook and Twitter.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Imagine Facebook Timeline for your entire life. Including everything your phone ever did. Being monitored by Homeland Security.
At least you should be able to look at it yourself.
It's kind of an interesting thing to think about.
lets assume these tests were actually effective (big assumption). So they do a great job selecting candidates that are best for the position. Work places become better, but job hunting becomes worse. Do people want to take the chance of being one of the poor guys that gets bounced out by these tests some day for the reward of working with better peers.
Personally I like the balance generally where it is. I'll accept that I sometimes have to work with people who arn't really the best at their job in exchange for their being some variability in my favor when I'm looking for work (assuming these tests would have rules against me.. which is anyones guess.. ).
That the best times to call him are between the hours of 2 am and 8 am as he is most likely to not be engaged in a phone call. Guess whose getting calls between those hours.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
This is the typical average response from slashdot readers since most of us can only claim to be better than others rather than actually proving it. Hence, the need to make others smaller. Sadly, much of human interaction falls into this category and its likely that comparisons like that Wolfram's life log provides will only prove that to be true. I wish it weren't so as it would then be easier to find interesting things in slashdot without having to wade to inordinate amounts of self-preening to find interesting tidbits that one can use in one's own life. Then again, we're all human so we have to live with the consequences.
Having access to your own data produces a very positive feedback loop. If you can see your schedule drifting, you can reorient yourself to correct it quickly. I keep track of a few things such as when I wake up, go to sleep, get to work, leave work, and a small handful of personal metrics such as a numeric value for how effective I was at work on a given day.. I've learned a lot from it. For example, I have a better idea now of how my level of engagement (# of hours worked) relates to how effective I am. If I spend a few more hours, I tend to be significantly more engaged. It helps me figure out the difference between burnt out and disinterest. After a crappy week, I might choose to work all weekend or turn off my work email and relax. Depending on what kind of funk I'm in, it can help me decide how to right the ship.
So when I see a boring graph, I see someone who has figured themselves out. It's figuring yourself out so you know what you need to track in order to effectively manage yourself.
The time spent analyzing emails and phone calls could have been spent learning how to write more effective emails, make more effective phone calls etc. Don't analyze your life to death and then brag about it. Organize it so that you maximize your gain for minimum effort.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+