The optimization marketing does its damage in a specific way: a composite score with no published weighting cannot be contradicted, so people stop looking underneath it. What survives is smaller and more useful, which is roughly Eric's point above. Your own history is the reference, so the device is poor at last night and decent at telling you the date something changed.
For most people, the main benefit of health-tracking devices and apps isn't data-driven insights, but that it makes them pay attention to their sleep and exercise patterns--at least until the novelty wears off. It's also a great opportunity for basic health education, as most people won't ever read a book on sleep. Finally, even if I have an intuitive understanding of how well I slept last night, I don't have a good understanding of how much my sleep is changing over time, so for this at least data collection can be useful!
This comment is 100% certified organic human-written by Pangram 🤪
Yay! I was really hoping to find out who was there. I never really had a sense of what was happening at those meetings, but they looked really, really fun.
Yeah, the topics were quite diverse, as we held events at many different venues, including major companies, universities, and even an Apple Store. It was a lot of fun, thanks to our excellent organizing team. I’ll share this post with them!
Nice article. My experience matched what you wrote about wearables: The data from my Apple Watch mostly confirmed things I already suspected rather than revealing anything surprising. I still found the analysis fun to do, and one result was gratifying to see laid out in graphical form: my resting heart rate dropped steadily after I began my exercise regimen.
I also took this on as a way to teach myself Claude Code, and in that aspect, it was a success. Writing all those R scripts from scratch would have taken me far longer if I had to do them without any assistance from AI. My write-up is here: https://www.self-experiments.org/five-years-of-exercise-tracked/
Excellent summary, as always. The world missed your regular writing while you finished your book!
One additional underrated benefit of self-tracking is simply _attention_. It's not about the steps _per se_, but rather the side effects that come from recognizing exercise/movement as a thing.
The optimization marketing does its damage in a specific way: a composite score with no published weighting cannot be contradicted, so people stop looking underneath it. What survives is smaller and more useful, which is roughly Eric's point above. Your own history is the reference, so the device is poor at last night and decent at telling you the date something changed.
For most people, the main benefit of health-tracking devices and apps isn't data-driven insights, but that it makes them pay attention to their sleep and exercise patterns--at least until the novelty wears off. It's also a great opportunity for basic health education, as most people won't ever read a book on sleep. Finally, even if I have an intuitive understanding of how well I slept last night, I don't have a good understanding of how much my sleep is changing over time, so for this at least data collection can be useful!
This comment is 100% certified organic human-written by Pangram 🤪
Hi, I really miss the QS Tokyo. I was one of the organizers and of course I'm in the pic. :)
Happy to see the QS community is trying to reboot. Will catch up with the podcast.
Yay! I was really hoping to find out who was there. I never really had a sense of what was happening at those meetings, but they looked really, really fun.
Yeah, the topics were quite diverse, as we held events at many different venues, including major companies, universities, and even an Apple Store. It was a lot of fun, thanks to our excellent organizing team. I’ll share this post with them!
Nice article. My experience matched what you wrote about wearables: The data from my Apple Watch mostly confirmed things I already suspected rather than revealing anything surprising. I still found the analysis fun to do, and one result was gratifying to see laid out in graphical form: my resting heart rate dropped steadily after I began my exercise regimen.
I also took this on as a way to teach myself Claude Code, and in that aspect, it was a success. Writing all those R scripts from scratch would have taken me far longer if I had to do them without any assistance from AI. My write-up is here: https://www.self-experiments.org/five-years-of-exercise-tracked/
Excellent summary, as always. The world missed your regular writing while you finished your book!
One additional underrated benefit of self-tracking is simply _attention_. It's not about the steps _per se_, but rather the side effects that come from recognizing exercise/movement as a thing.