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The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

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Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#21

Post by gwern »

apawloski wrote: post #8

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,…

> 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 * 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

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#22

Post by mahyarm »

bhousel wrote: post #2

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.

I find it useful if it's mostly automated. I use a basis band for sleep & activity, and a fitbit aria scale for weight. It being automated doesn't stress me out and it's useful to have a history to see trends.

I also find it fun to start some runkeeper app when I go on bike rides, and that only takes about a minute or two before I start it. I never actually look at the history of my cardio workouts, but it's fun to have the stats while I'm biking, and to see a map of where I went after I'm done.

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#24

Post by ksyeung »

marmalade wrote: post #20

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.

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?!

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

ksyeung wrote: post #24
marmalade wrote: post #20

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.

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?!

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....

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#26

Post by tel »

gwern wrote: post #21
apawloski wrote: post #8

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,…

> 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 anal…

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

https://personalexperiments.org/article/about

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#27

Post by gwern »

tel wrote: post #26
gwern wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anal…

This is great. Have you looked into Ian Eslick's Personal Experiments? https://personalexperiments.org/article/about

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.

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#28

Post by sheraz »

rickdale wrote: post #10
sheraz wrote: post #4

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.

What you are missing is that people figuring out useful stats from all these numbers and then improving their lives based on real life in real time. I suggest you try this for 1 day, just keep track of your happiness. Its really interesting and optimizable, as you can find out. Sure no one is saying quantified will get you from a 1 to a 10 on the happiness scale, but it will definitely help you to learn more about yo…

OK, then -- What might one learn by tracking something as squishy and undefined as happiness? I find it ridiculous that anyone would attempt to reduce happiness to a single numeric range.

  - I don't need to track my happiness to know if I'm happy. 
  - I don't need to track my sleeping patterns to learn how to sleep better.
  - I don't need to track every calorie to know if I'm eating well.
  - I don't need a computer to tell me if I'm healthy.
It seems to me that QS is just a new fad that will make a certain personality type feel like they have control over their lives.

"Quantified Self -- Using numbers, technology, and science to divine common sense!"

Re: The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self

#29

Post by tel »

gwern wrote: post #27
tel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. Have you looked into Ian Eslick's Personal Experiments? https://personalexperiments.org/article/about

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.

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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