
The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self - sethkravitz
http://technori.com/2013/04/4281-the-beginners-guide-to-quantified-self-plus-a-list-of-the-best-personal-data-tools-out-there/
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apawloski
Any movement that lacks explicit acknowledgement of statistical significance
is worrisome to me. I think for many -- myself included -- it is temptingly
easy to attribute causation or project a bias onto data collected like this
(eg "I'm in a bad mood today because I only slept for 5 and a half hours last
night").

I would be interested in analyzing the data after I had a large pool and a
decent idea of shape, center, and spread, but I also don't trust myself to
wait that long.

~~~
gwern
> Any movement that lacks explicit acknowledgement of statistical significance
> is worrisome to me.

I'm not necessarily too worried about that _. Statistical significance is the
wrong concept for QS and its use is essentially cargo cult statistics.

Leaving aside the profound conceptual and applied problems with null-
hypothesis testing ( <http://lesswrong.com/lw/g13/against_nhst/> ), QS is much
closer to cost-benefit analysis where effect sizes and costs are the critical
variables, not alpha. We don't care about testing some intervention and not
making the completely arbitrary cutoff of 0.05 (which doesn't mean anything
about the truth of the hypothesis in the first place)! We care whether the
intervention make a large impact on the variable in question and how expensive
the intervention was; if, say, the intervention is an expensive supplement
that costs hundreds of dollars a year, we want a higher burden of proof than
if the intervention is something free (like taking your vitamin D supplement
in the morning rather than evening) or something we should be doing anyway
(like exercise).

_Far* more worrisome than QS's failure to run t-tests and ritually chant 'we
calculate a p-value of <0.05 therefore we reject the null hypothesis of no
difference' is the pervasive publication bias (who reports failed
experiments?), the absence of blinding even where quite easy leading to severe
placebo effects (many supplements), tiny sample sizes, and dodgy data
collection (selection bias).

* If you are wondering why anyone would care about my opinion, I've been self-experimenting for years and have a little bit of insight into the matter; see <http://www.gwern.net/Zeo> <http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics> and <http://www.gwern.net/Weather>

~~~
tel
This is great. Have you looked into Ian Eslick's Personal Experiments?

<https://personalexperiments.org/article/about>

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gwern
No, I've never heard of them before (some sort of variation on CureTogether or
something?) The website seems to want me to register for a study of some sort
before it will tell me more...

EDIT: bleh, and now that I look at my original comment, I see I failed to
escape an asterisk so the formatting is completely screwed up.

~~~
tel
Personal Experiments isn't about cross comparisons. It's mostly just a way to
state and execute on some (n-of-1) self-experimentation.

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npsimons
I'm torn, because QS is something I'm interested in and something I think many
could benefit from, but at the same time this article reads like an
advertisement, especially since it suspiciously lacks mention of well known
alternatives. You could argue that they only mention what they think of as
"the best", but I would argue that most of these tools put far too much of
your information into other peoples' hands. As an alternative, at least for
biometrics, consider the following list of bluetooth enabled devices which can
be used with software that doesn't upload your data to someone else's servers:

<http://personalheartmonitor.com/sensors.html>

I'd also have to recommend org-mode in Emacs, at least for time tracking. I
know it's not "mobile", but I use it on my phone to track all sorts of things,
and since the format is plain text, I can slice and dice in any language I
want, no third parties needed.

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joefarish
Narrato are building an open platform for the quantified self. They currently
only have one sample app called Narrato journal but it might be one to keep an
eye on: <https://www.narrato.co/>

On the subject of quantified self Stephen Wolfram's blog post 'The Personal
Analytics of My Life' ([http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-
analytic...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-
my-life/)) is an interesting read.

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edanm
Interesting. I just started trying out BeeMinder myself, which seems like a
good tool to both track things about yourself, and commit to changing your
behaviour.

They kept mentioning the "quantified self" and I didn't know what they were
talking about.

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bhousel
I've found that I'm actually a lot happier _not_ tracking all this stuff about
myself. I was tracking my sleep, my running, my eating, my stress, my time,
etc. Then a few months ago decided that I needed to focus more on living life
and less on just checking in to it.

~~~
npsimons
I think that finding your optimal level of data tracking, or even ramping it
down after building a habit is key to these sorts of things. It's a
cost/benefit tradeoff, really. The thing is that the cost side is being
changed by the fact that much of the data collection can be automated these
days, and hopefully the analysis side can be automated as well, so that you
don't have to focus as much on the numbers.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Right. How much you track and what you track is extremely important. For
example, I was massively more motivated to exercise after I started actually
tracking my performance. I'm a skinny nerd and my goal was to gain muscle
mass, and on previous attempts I'd given up in frustration after I didn't gain
any weight over several weeks. Rationally I knew the exercise had to be having
an effect but it was still demotivating.

But when I started tracking I found that while my overall weight wasn't
changing, my percentage of body fat was dropping, indicating that I was in
fact gaining muscle. It's not like this was technically new information, but
seeing the numbers triggered some sort of response in me which made it very
easy to keep going to the gym.

~~~
npsimons
This is a prime example of how QS is supposed to work. Many people talk about
deliberate practice, but the truth is, you can't practice deliberately unless
you are tracking what you want to change. Of course, the other half of
deliberate practice is knowing the most effective way to induce change, but
much like in programming, how do you know it is working if you aren't
tracking/testing it? Temet nosce.

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jacques_chester
The old school version of this is called the Personal Software Process, first
described in _A Discipline for Software Engineering_. It was sometimes used as
a punchline by early agile advocacy.

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marmalade
What would be nice is to find a decent site/app for tracking food intake. That
is one area that I would love to track but the current landscape of apps for
it are lacking.

MyFitnessPal's UI is pretty bad but seems to have decent data if you can find
it.

Fitbit's UI is nice but the food database and lookup is atrocious.

~~~
ksyeung
I absolutely agree. It is absurd that the two most popular Fitness/Diet apps
are so poorly designed, especially given the open nature of the ecosystem.
Users, developers: why?!

~~~
TeMPOraL
I guess because the apps are optimized to look nice, as opposed to being
ergonomic and functional.

For any tracking that doesn't require support database (like food calories), I
switched to TapLog [0]; it's the only sane tracking app I've seen so far. It
allows you to place buttons on your homescreen to track custom-defined
categories (I use, among others, Expense, Weight, Sleep time). You can store a
number, a rate (1-5) OR a text description. And that's it. You press the
button, type in the quantity, press "Log" and you're done. And it allows you
to export all data to CSV - for me it's the most important feature (and
without it, I won't be using any kind of tracking app).

[0] -
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waterbear....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waterbear.taglog&hl=pl)

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noneTheHacker
AskMeEvery.com is blocked by Trend Micro for me saying "Dangerous Verified
fraudulent page or threat source." I assume it is a false positive but I
wanted to bring it up in case Mark reads this so that he can look into getting
Trend to fix it.

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vbl
Sweet ad for askmeevery.com.

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sheraz
Meh. This quantified self business is just the next iteration of herbal
remedies, Chinese medicine, and all that other pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo
out there. You might as well add your astrological sign to all these apps.

This is yet another area where people are attempting to layer technology on
top of a problem that does not exist.

~~~
kiba
_Meh. This quantified self business is just the next iteration of herbal
remedies, Chinese medicine, and all that other pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo
out there. You might as well add your astrological sign to all these apps._

Why would you think that? If anything, the self quantified movement is all
about thinking scientifically to improve yourself. Gathering data, analyzing,
designing experiments, generating hypothesis, and publishing for feedback are
all part of being self quantified.

~~~
sheraz
You make the assumption that people will use the scientific method with this
stuff. The more likely scenario is that people will optimize for a single
number (VDL/HDL, weight, or other) and miss the whole point.

The attitude that we can simply "optimize our life" is reductionist, arrogant,
foolhardy. You will spend more time optimizing your numbers than you will
living your life. But hey, at least you have the data to back it up :-)

