Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Find Self Tracking Useful Like Stephen Wolfram Does?
New submitter Manzanita writes "The domain of personal analytics, or 'Quantified Self,' is rich with interesting things to measure and many hackers have started projects. But they will only take off if it is sufficiently easy to gather and use the data. Stephen Wolfram has collected and analyzed a lot of his personal data over the last 20 years, but that is far beyond what most of us have the time for. What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
Does that count?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... I spend reading articles about tracking things that I track.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Check your premises.
There are lots of ways to go for my daily commute. Just because one is faster one day doesn't mean that it always will be.
Yes, I have kept logs for my travel times. I figure that saving a minute a day definitely adds up over the course of a couple of years.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
If the average person is sat down and told how much of their life is spent in front of the TV or playing video games, I would expect them to have a breakdown. It's one thing to know "I watch TV for 2 hours a day" but it's completely different when you're told "In the last year you spent 732 hours (yay leap year) watching TV." It's bad enough when MMO's and Steam made it possible to see your playtime. :)
Not generally driven by efficiency, but happiness.
I guess theoretically the data could be used to increase happiness, but I'd rather use my tried and true method of:
- doing things that I know make me happy
- investigating things I suspect will make me happy
- avoiding things which will not make me happy
- maintaining balance in the necessary evils and mitigating negative aspects (career properly balanced between enough money to be happy and job that while I don't dance out of bed in the morning, I generally enjoy).
That said, different things make people happy. Some people are efficiency junkies. Some people are financial junkies (everyone knows at least one obsessive day trader who doesn't make much money, and knows it, but still spends every free moment playing in the stock market).
.. and I guess I enjoy abruptly ending posts mid paragraph with no final conclusion!
I wouldn't sweat the whole ending posts mid paragraph thing. Sometimes I
Check your premises.
... indicate at what point collecting and analyzing personal data becomes indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder?
A vast amount of data is useless unless you can filter it and analyze it to pick out the important information.
Your brain already does this as you live your life.
Tracking other mundane shit is a pointless exercise in nerdsturbation.
Inflation is a bitch, ain't it? Tracking wages is like rubbing salt into an open wound.
Life is not for the lazy.
Part of a healthy mind is the ability to forget unimportant or no longer relevant information in favor of more recent and accurate things. If i tracked myself I wouldn't be able to forget the unimportant or push aside the less desirable. I would be governed by old data and held to means and modes of things that may not reflect current realities.
This seems more like punishment than an aid.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
Wolfram's self-tracking is nothing compared to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile
Here's the deal -- it's interesting as a sample. You might extrapolate a lot from his data. For a better sample tools just aren't there, except are they? A smartphone knows everything about your habits. I have been tracking any walk, jog, cycle, hike, or paddle I take with an app on my smartphone for about two years. Guess what I found out? I don't care enough to do anything with the data. I'm fit, I'm healthy and happy, I'm not an obsessed athlete. I get the idea and the nerdgasm of data, but I it doesn't help me enjoy life more.
Fortunately, I have lots of time for this sort of thing.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
While not my cup of tea.. I'm of the attitude that one should do whatever makes them happy.
People get off on all kinds of weird stuff.
Look at collectors. I don't get that shit either. People will spend as much as I did on a used car to buy a lamp with the same functional value and in some cases asthetic appearance you'd get at walmart .. because it was made a long time ago and/or is rare. Oh but not everything rare/old is valuable! There isn't even a clear definition or reason why one old/rare thing is priceless, and another is literally priceless (as in, no one will buy it). And a lot of people buy this stuff at auctions so they can sell it to other people who sell it to other people.. with no one actually wanting the object! I think it might all be a sick inside joke.
"What do you find worth tracking? What is ripe for developing into a business?"
Money and food. I use less of each when I track each and avoid excess.
I find general health worth tracking. For a while, as part of my new year's resolution, I had a spreadsheet to track my body weight and blood pressure as well as to keep a log of everything I ate and drank and the amount I had exercised. I also had columns where I'd score my subjective well-being and stress levels, and one for general comments. Some interesting findings were that, unfortunately, exercise had a positive effect on my blood pressure. I also found that my stress levels strongly correlated with my alcohol intake the night before. Nothing like some first hand experience to learn something. Later on I found out that the hormone cortisol is responsible for those stress levels and yes, released when taking alcohol. I'd hardly call what I did solid science, but it is nice to find out when solid science confirms your own feeble efforts.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Burma Shave.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
doing things that I know make me happy
Some people enjoy collecting data, calculating statistics and drawing graphs.
Personally I just eat the cost.
I pay the going rate when my tank runs out. I buy a car based largely on how it feels from the driver seat.
Sure I'm missing out on some money savings, but I get to use that time/chunk of my brain for other things I enjoy
Modded
Sorry about that last one, folks. I'll try to do better next time.
Have gnu, will travel.
How about the number of times I visit and minutes I spend reading/posting to slash.dot each day/week/ :P
Fourteen years ago, I worked for a company (which was long since partitioned and spun-off) that tracked personal web usage to the extent that each employee and his/her manager was sent an email detailing weekly web usage: url of each site visited, amount of data downloaded from each site, and the employee's over-all bandwidth usage for the week compared to everyone else in the company. The manager of my department didn't care and my neighbor usually ranked in the top 50 out of 2000 and was proud of it XD
It's an exercise in gathering completely useless data.
How many people on Slashdot still have emails they sent in 1990? 1991? 1992? How many of those emails that you still have are actually relevant today? Worse still, how relevant to today is it to know how many emails you sent in 1990, 1991 or 1992?
Even more useless....number of keystrokes per day for the last 10 years.
This guy is going to die someday and his wife and kids are going to toss all this crap right into the dustbin.
It is interesting and useful as a concept. You cannot really improve anything if you cannot measure it accurately, and so data gathering and analysis can certainly be extremely useful.
However, I don't see much value in just collecting these digital signals like typing and email. Contrary to the title of the post, it is very impersonal. It is just email, really, and even for a serious tech head like Wolfram, that is surely a tiny part of his life.
I also am one of those people with a huge email archive going back decades, and it is fun to play with. Certainly it is fun to find the first emails you sent to someone from ages ago. I also saved all of my old engineering notebooks, and it is great to go back and see things from the early days of QuickTime or notes from the very first time I saw a Mac Laptop - that sort of stuff.
But I think it would be great if I could keep a detailed record of the things that I really care about. For example - I would like to know how much exercise I am actually doing, so I can see if I am really taking the stairs more. I would like to know how much time I spent in the car, so I could make more accurate decisions about the cost of living far from work. I would like to know how many new people I am meeting every week, so I can see if I am becoming more or less social. I would like to know when new topics are trending for me, so I can make sure I am continuing to expand my interests. I would like to monitor how much time I am spending with friends and family as opposed to just work and workmates. I would like to know how many times I gave a sarcastic answer to a question to make sure I am not becoming a dick. Now that I have a Kindle, I can't tell if I am reading more or fewer books than I used to. Am I really watching less TV because I play more video games, or am I keeping that constant and stealing video game time from other non-screen activities? These are just a few examples. No doubt you have your own list.
The point is that if you care about acting a certain way, it is super useful to measure it. You can measure all of the things I mentioned right now, but many of them are a huge pain. If technology could somehow make this easier, I would be all for it.
I just don't want FaceBook or Google to do it without asking me. :-)
- davevr
Personal analytics like anything else can become an obsession. I think tracking your caloric intake, weight, blood pressure, exercise and money spending are worthwhile for health and financial well being (I've lost 40 lbs this way). Writing down the names of people you meet (if you're bad at remembering names) is good for social happiness. Writing down yearly goals is probably good for achieving your definition of success. If you care about it, you should probably track it.
Is Stephen Wolfram doing this because Stephen Wolfram thinks everyone forgot about Stephen Wolfram? I wonder if Stephen Wolfram refers to Stephen Wolfram in the third-person. Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram.
I really wanted to get the word out about this event coming up at Stanford. I feel like a bit of a fool for not putting the link in the submission!
There will be a panel discussing just this topic at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB). VLAB puts on a great event. If you are in the area you should definitely join us!
The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
When:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
6:00 - 7:00pm Networking and Refreshments
7:00 - 8:30pm Panel Discussion and Q&A
Where:
Stanford Graduate School of Business
CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center
Moderator:
Gary Wolf, Co-Founder, The Quantified Self & Editor, Wired Magazine
Panelists:
Rick Lee, CEO of Healthrageous
Mark S. Gainey, Co-Founder Strava, Inc
Leslie Ziegler: Creative Director, Rock Health
Greg LeMond, Three-Time Winner of the Tour de France
Event Description
Large companies, as well as, garage hackers are leveraging smaller,
cheaper sensors and powerful mobile devices are accelerating the
virtuous circle of goal setting, data collection, analysis and social
motivation necessary to stimulate lasting and steady gains in health,
sports performance or other areas of self evolution.
What happens when we add the power of Social/Mobile and always-on
personal devices to the evolving health markets. Peer pressure (social
reinforcement) and data tracking have significantly contributed to the
success of the $11B self improvement and $55B weight loss markets.
Legacy business such as Weight Watchers have relied on snippets of
painstakingly input data. How will the game be changed when personal
data goes from a drop in the bucket to an ocean?
What new perspectives do start ups provide using sensors and on-line
services, to disrupt and support the incumbents in self evolution and
health? And, what is needed for break-out success?
What new opportunities will exist in widespread tracking?
How do you keep users engaged long enough to make meaningful changes?
Will a start-up create virality to accelerate growth, become
a category killer?
What are the challenges of collecting and applying meaningful data?
What incentives are effective to encourage adoption outside
of tracker enthusiasts and early adopters?
Can a single offering service survive or will those
aggregating multiple data streams dominate?
Can these services grow on an ad based model or is a
subscription necessary?
How are companies using social motivation to encourage
consistent engagement and long term participation?
http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=438
I guess you missed the study that showed that facebook users are insecure, narcissistic, and have low self-esteem.
Methinks thou doth protest too much:-) In other words, your defense of facebook probably indicates that you are insecure, vain, and have a low opinion of yourself.
One of the points of the study is that people used facebook as a poor substitute for "being social and interacting with people." It's real name should be "anti-social networking for losers."
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.