You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your ideas about yourself — what makes you happy, healthy, and whole — turned out to be wrong? And how would you even find out? You’d probably start by becoming a self-tracker, piling up all kinds of data on your daily life. Then you’d analyze that data, and maybe you’d find that coffee doesn’t help you concentrate after all and that your sleep patterns aren’t correlated to your happiness. You’d almost certainly read The Quantified Life, a blog on self-tracking and self-experimentation. Seth Roberts, the self-experimenter Dubner and Levitt wrote about in 2005, makes frequent appearances.[%comments]
The Quantified Life
TAGS: Happiness
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Interesting concept. I have never thought of doing that to learn more about myself.
reminds me of the parable: a man, sitting on a couch, watching TV- he suddenly has a bout of anxiety, wondering if he really is there- so he runs outside his house and looks through the window toward the couch… nobody home
Ah yes turn yourself into statistics (and perhaps share your findings on social networks?) . . . as if our lives weren’t abstracted enough. (Because, indeed, when seen longitudinally, coffee really doesn’t increase my levels of concentration, even though the chemistry says it does, and, as 90% of us would confess, we wouldn’t have made it through college without coffee!) When will economists realize that their science is not the ultimate horizon, that their vistas aren’t as far-seeing and as radical as they’d like to think?
As for this bunch, the authors of “(Super) Freakonomics”, please note that counter-intuitiveness doesn’t mean true, especially when approached in such an rhapsodic, myopic and glib manner. But then again, what’s true is what sells, right? Empiricism breeds its own charlatans.
This is record keeping, which is a key to good science in the broadest sense..
I once met a journalism student who kept a detailed diary. I thought his diary might be the basis for a future book, but he told me it was merely a record that he would review some time later to understand how his memory played tricks on him, and he believed that this mental bias might be correctable. He said his goal was to be an excellent observer.
I admired his efforts.
The problem w/ it seems to be one of data collection.
I actually at one point wanted to do a ‘life-time-tracking’ app on my PDA (this was before the days of the iPhone). How to classify what I was spending my time doing in a sensible way? (not having to write it out for each entry, resulting in an un-aggregatable mess like the 50 different variations of Hip Hop/Hip-Hop/Rap/Rappin/Superrappin in the ‘genre’ listing in my iPod). Just designing all the icons would be a Herculean task.
It would be nice to know what kind of self-destructive things you are doing (besides the obvious). I will definitely read the book, and maybe take another stab at that.
In several stages of my life, I have had extreme difficulty concentrating. Every time I began to feel that way, I blamed my slow response and forgetfulness on a certain drug that I had been partaking in, because that’s what conventional wisdom would suggest. It never took me long to realize, however, that the drug was a constant, and frequency of use didn’t correlate with my difficulties. After long stints of self-analysis, I always concluded that my troubles stemmed from cognitive dissonance; in other words behavioral, not chemical causes (although hormonal chemistry had something to do with it at some point).
last post should’ve been written,
In my work (investing) there’s such a high random quotient in results of even the very best, that excruciatingly extensive and detailed statistics are necessary. I recently went to a conference of quantitative finance where a researcher spent an hour trying to convince us that with his clever & careful statistics, 0.6% of mutual funds could be seen to actually deliver superior results after fees, above what you’d get from a (no charge) index fund. Existing tests, star results, etc., have been shown to have zero predictive power of repeating out-performance.
Daunting as those odds are, his technique didn’t allow you to actually discover who was in that 0.6%.
So the quantified life could be useful, but if others’ lives are as random as my work life is, it could just turn into obsessive journal-keeping without any insight. If happiness, meaning or fulfillment is the goal, I’d look for a better understanding through lit, re-watching Rashomon or Dr. Strangelove, religion, Three Stooges reruns, studying modern physics or Haiku, etc. etc.
Thanks for noticing our project! Perhaps the pithy criticism in the comments that “Empiricism breeds its own charlatans” is worth answering briefly. It is common for people who stumble across QS to mistake the intention. This is basically a curiosity-driven project, and most of the people who participate don’t make big general claims. The goal isn’t to answer the same kinds of questions addressed in a population study or clinical trial, but to gather and analyze personal data that may yield insight about individual experiences. While it is of course true that you can’t get to certain levels of generality with n=1 experiments, it is also rather obvious that if you are reflecting on your own situation it can be helpful to have a record of some kind, and perhaps even to do some analysis of this record, or make an experiment. I’d like to encourage anybody who is doing this sort of thing and reads this post to share their methods and conclusions with us.
Gary Wolf
http://www.quantifiedself.org