On the (un)quantified self

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lumps
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On the (un)quantified self

Post by lumps »

Hi all. I wasn't sure where to post this, but I think it fits well into the simple living category of this subforum.

I recently got into swimming, and was debating buying a fitness tracker to help with counting laps/pace. Trying to keep to the ERE mindset, I questioned this consumption decision for a while. It bothers me that even if I used it a lot it's likely going to break in 10 years, and mainly that it will then be difficult to fix. Like many things we do today, humans have been achieving great feats in swimming [biking, running, or any of the *48* activities that the $600-1000+ latest garmin tracks, not counting other tools like.. hydration management] for decades before the advent of fitness trackers. I eventually learned that the pace clock available at my gym's swimming pool would work well for me, and at no additional cost to my $10/mo. gym membership.

The pace clock is still a tool that in theory quantifies my effort and teaches me how to maintain a pace. I struggle getting convinced to live a fully unquantified life (https://nomasters.io/posts/unquantified/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self are interesting reads regarding this), and I feel like the drive to quantify our sleep, fitness efforts, food intake, etc. is something many of us are familiar with and may be doing (how many people do you know that have a fitbit in a drawer?), and may be driving consumption and not driving happiness or progress.

A personal finance parallel is the use of budgets vs not. As the nomasters.io author put it, [budgeting/quantification] can serve as a simulacrum of introspection. I think it's worth thinking about what metrics are distracting us from introspection, not really trying to argue against the black and white 100% unquantified vs not since I don't think that's the point of thinking about this, similarly no one would defend 100% quantification. Personally, I've been focused on FIRE for the past 2.5 years and at my stage I have found online budgeting tools like mint useful because they are the cold hard facts and at least force introspection after the fact (I've been at 60%SR excl. tax/$26K per yr expenses in a LCOL, so I can still modify my lifestyle for ERE). For swimming, I'll probably continue using a pace clock and have structured workouts based on that. For biking and bodyweight strength training, I think I'll just have fun with it/push myself.

On a final note, I am a (chemical) process engineer in a company that is trying to get us to implement more KPIs (key performance indicators, or metrics quantifying different parts of our workflow). It's an easy task to do (pencil-whip) but a hard one to implement in a way that actually brings value. Many times, we already know what it is we need to do, so a red mark on your metric shouldn't come as a shock if you already know there's a problem. For less obvious metrics, often it is difficult to quantify what's needed for rolling out a KPI/metric, and there's often no easy way to automate this, yet we roll out a KPI with shitty data and no data acquisition plan (cart before the horse). In my personal life, I find myself willingly spending time on thinking about KPIs (e.g. fitness trackers) instead of doing what I know is needed (spend less money/learn more skills, exert more physical effort), so funny how that works.

oldbeyond
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by oldbeyond »

Tracking/quantifying have been useful to me when I’ve caught myself being dishonest with myself (telling myself that I’m doing better than I am) or when I ruminate on something and cold, hard numbers can put an end to the internal debate. Usually the numbers eventually lead to a deeper understanding that eliminates the need for continuous measurement. For example, I used to fret a lot about my diet, but with greater familiarity with how cooking, health, environmental footprint, shopping and storage interact, quantifying one or a few variables became less interesting. Now it’s more fruitful to fine-tune my heuristics and running controlled experiments, as well as familiarizing myself with new frameworks that provide new insights.

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unemployable
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by unemployable »

lumps wrote:
Sun Oct 10, 2021 12:33 pm
even if I used it a lot it's likely going to break in 10 years
Mine didn't even last two. And wasn't fully functional for even that long, because when I got a new phone, identical to my old one, I couldn't get it to sync for the life of me.

Yeah, as you alluded to, I didn't need a step-counter on my wrist to hike some 400 mountains in Colorado and another few hundred outside of it. How the hell did Lewis and Clark ever reach the Pacific.

Dream of Freedom
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by Dream of Freedom »

I use an oura ring and a habit tracker called habitica. In my opinion, you are discounting the behavioral and neurological aspects of self-quantification. So you receive a stimulus. You react correctly. You feel rewarded by the device saying the action was correct. Then you release dopamine that strengthens the pathway that caused the action that makes the same action more likely in the future. These devices and apps can sometimes inform on what you don't know, but mostly they work through changing human behavior.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by mountainFrugal »

Specific to exercise trackers... they are not necessary as a pen and paper to track workouts usually does the trick for most training to stay in shape and make consistent gains. Necessary, absolutely not. A very helpful tool for achieving longer term exercise projects, yes. If you are trying to make larger gains for some currently completely out of reach goal without 6-months to a year of solid training, then tracking heart rate, speed, elevation, etc. can help significantly for estimating how your body is adapting to the load and recovering. Proper recovery is how you get faster and stronger. Endurance sports in particular have fairly well played out paths for getting better using a pyramiding approach that builds off of a base period into increasing volume and then doing some race specific training. The problem is when you become a slave to the training schedule and over-train. It is difficult to estimate just the right amount of recovery needed or the next period of load to apply without knowing how well you have recovered and absorbed the recent training. Personal metrics such as heart rate are really good physiological indicators of how hard you are working while exercising, how high your heart rate is after you exercise, how long it takes to get back to baseline etc. If you are over-training, your sleeping resting heart rate will be elevated which most of the newish sport watches track in addition to how active you are at night. These metrics are correlated with how deeply you are sleeping and can even be confounded with having sleep apnea (my brother) or occasionally drinking (effects sleep and recovery). So it sounds like the pool clock is perfect for what you are currently doing!

I agree that in general people go overboard with personal tracking. I do like it for my larger/longer term exercise goals (5 year plan) to have an exercise watch that I use every day until they no longer function. I have even written custom exercise data analysis software for all of my exercise data, but I do not take the watch itself that seriously. It is just a tool. It is an even better tool when you use it to guess what your heart rate/speed/etc. is and then look at the watch to build up intuition about perceived exertion. Quantified self does not need to be all or nothing.

Toska2
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by Toska2 »

I know someone who plays ultimate frisbee. He doesn't count calories, steps or team points. He does count the number of people who show up at a potluck dinner after a tournament game tho.

Charts or friends, whatever it takes to make exercise a regular habit is a positive.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by mountainFrugal »

Toska2 wrote:
Sun Oct 10, 2021 11:22 pm
He does count the number of people who show up at a potluck dinner after a tournament game tho.
The best sort of metric!

lumps
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by lumps »

@oldbeyond
I'm with you regarding the ruminating aspect, I started using mint for that very reason. It sucks that I can't just be more diligent about cooking at home, but at least now I know exactly what it's costing me and where I can get to.

@unemployable
Well you see I really wanted to buy one, so I was letting myself believe 10 years was a realistic lifespan :)

@Dream of Freedom
I read "How to Change" by Katy Milkman (behavioral scientist) which covers gamification [and several other strategies for habit forming, I'd recommend it], have also read about it from other contexts and tried habitica and other forms of habit tracking. Adam Alter's "Irresistible" also covers how good fitness trackers can be in forming a habit to the point where it helps fuel addictive behaviour (e.g. people who run everyday for decades even when they have an injury. Here's an excerpt that adds on to @mountainFrugal's point
Schreiber and Sim both recognized that smartwatches and fitness trackers have probably inspired sedentary people to take up exercise, and encouraged people who aren’t very active to exercise more consistently. But as experts in addiction, they were convinced the devices were also quite dangerous. Schreiber explained that “focusing on numbers divorces you from being in tune with your body. Exercising becomes mindless, which is ‘the goal’ of addiction.” This “goal” that she mentioned in quotes is a sort of automatic mindlessness, the outsourcing of decision making to a device. She had recently sustained a stress fracture in her foot because she refused to listen to her overworked body, instead continuing to run toward an arbitrary workout target. Schreiber has suffered from addictive exercise tendencies, and vows not to use wearable tech when she works out."
Don't get me wrong, if you don't have addictive tendencies I'm not implying that using the Oura ring is a problem, in fact I really wanted to get one as well, just in my personal case felt like there were a lot of clearly actionable steps I could take to improve the areas I'd be tracking with Oura.

@mountainFrugal
In Jacob's book was when I first read about the concept of an "appropriate response". I think that resonates with what you wrote. Depending on the goal, investment in fitness trackers [timer, coach, nutritionist, etc] may be merited. However if skills are developed [e.g.more of an intuition for exertion/recovery is built], then something such as a fitness tracker is less important even for the same goal.

I definitely agree this is a silly discussion from the all or nothing point of view, it'd be interesting to even try but I feel like I would always want to measure something about a workout.

@Toska2
Just checked and the latest Garmin doesn't have a setting to track potluck attendance, yet another reason to not bother getting one.

jacob
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by jacob »

It might be useful to distinguish four different cases: (process,outcome)x(tracking,no tracking). Fitbit et el are process trackers, whereas a scale or a caliper is an outcome tracker.

The upside is that humans tend to optimize whatever they're tracking (Goodhart's law). The downside is tracking the wrong variable and proceeding to optimize it.

Another issue is the error/random variable. This is usually eliminated by increasing tracking interval and assuming some stationarity. E.g. "only look at your portfolio every 30-360 days lest you overtrade random (to you) fluctuations". Alternatively, shorter scale tracking usually needs more variables and more complex modelling to turn what appears like randomness from 50000ft into causative behavior at 500ft.

lumps
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by lumps »

jacob wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:04 am
It might be useful to distinguish four different cases: (process,outcome)x(tracking,no tracking). Fitbit et el are process trackers, whereas a scale or a caliper is an outcome tracker.
I think often the intended outcomes are based on target process performance [e.g. 5 minute mile], and for many processes a given performance always means an outcome of $X in savings or reduced downtime. I'm personally used to tracking outcomes this way since a specific process performance metric has less noise than most outcome measurements (e.g. overall cost of inputs), so I always view the two categories as interchangeable. Though I can see how one use is that pure outcome measurements can eventually serve as a check to ensure you are picking the right process metric, though depending on the timescale and number of changes it can still be difficult to determine what had the most positive impact.

jacob wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:04 am
Another issue is the error/random variable. This is usually eliminated by increasing tracking interval and assuming some stationarity. E.g. "only look at your portfolio every 30-360 days lest you overtrade random (to you) fluctuations". Alternatively, shorter scale tracking usually needs more variables and more complex modelling to turn what appears like randomness from 50000ft into causative behavior at 500ft.
Just to add on regarding the measurement error, it's useful to observe how SPC (statistical process control) charts are setup, they are made understanding that there's both measurement and process variability (rolled up into the process standard deviation), which needs to be accounted for so you don't necessarily act on the first sign of a bad result.
Out-of-control signals
Image
  • A single point outside the control limits. In Figure 1, point sixteen is above the UCL (upper control limit).
  • Two out of three successive points are on the same side of the centerline and farther than 2 σ from it. In Figure 1, point 4 sends that signal.
  • Four out of five successive points are on the same side of the centerline and farther than 1 σ from it. In Figure 1, point 11 sends that signal.
  • A run of eight in a row are on the same side of the centerline. Or 10 out of 11, 12 out of 14, or 16 out of 20. In Figure 1, point 21 is eighth in a row above the centerline.
  • Obvious consistent or persistent patterns that suggest something unusual about your data and your process.
source:https://asq.org/quality-resources/control-chart

thai_tong
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Re: On the (un)quantified self

Post by thai_tong »

Our society tells us that achievement is what makes us valuable, and this pressures us to track our progress and strive for more.
What if, for a moment, we drop that idea that achievement is valuable, then what is the basis for quantifying? We're free to see value in just doing things, without being concerned with the value of the outcome

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