Are you tracking your performance?
- Thread starter Corpsey
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sufi
lala
i was reading some quantified self sceptics last night, prompted by this thread
sounds like a rabbit hole for obsessives
people who have come out the other side - after they got so deeply into measuring their activities it became an oppressive time-consuming daily chore, often for many years, say that it's like kicking an addiction, backsliding into mentally counting distances, keeping notes on moods when all they want after years of quantification is to reconnect with "intuition"
& they say it's not good for working out as you just damage yrself hitting numbers
but i think it was a learning process for them, these forlorn bloggers who publicly failed to achieve their stated aims, just that the learning doesnt come from the numbers. it comes from realisation that the body is not a machine, cause and effect in humans is impossible to measure in numbers and that any insights are illusory, triggered by false pattern recognition
of course i was looking for sceptics, so my own confirmation bias is evident there, i am consciously unquantified wherever possible, i think mainly as a way to avoid engagement with health-and-fitness-think, and/or any scrutiny of my life choices
sounds like a rabbit hole for obsessives
people who have come out the other side - after they got so deeply into measuring their activities it became an oppressive time-consuming daily chore, often for many years, say that it's like kicking an addiction, backsliding into mentally counting distances, keeping notes on moods when all they want after years of quantification is to reconnect with "intuition"
& they say it's not good for working out as you just damage yrself hitting numbers
but i think it was a learning process for them, these forlorn bloggers who publicly failed to achieve their stated aims, just that the learning doesnt come from the numbers. it comes from realisation that the body is not a machine, cause and effect in humans is impossible to measure in numbers and that any insights are illusory, triggered by false pattern recognition
of course i was looking for sceptics, so my own confirmation bias is evident there, i am consciously unquantified wherever possible, i think mainly as a way to avoid engagement with health-and-fitness-think, and/or any scrutiny of my life choices
Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
Lightweight calorie tracking and exercise tracking. Enjoyable and moderately useful.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Amazon geotrackers, tacographs on freight/courier multi drop, the world as margins for profit converted to wristwatch looking gadgets
Your next mechanical organ transplant will be by google or meta but I respect any genuine movement towards/fulfilling fitness, just a ton of alternative options where you’re not plugged in or manacled 24/7. A bike gets you places, ok roads here take the piss still doesn’t change getting out as a superb mind and body floss
Your next mechanical organ transplant will be by google or meta but I respect any genuine movement towards/fulfilling fitness, just a ton of alternative options where you’re not plugged in or manacled 24/7. A bike gets you places, ok roads here take the piss still doesn’t change getting out as a superb mind and body floss
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Running's only permissible in a public space if you're chasing someone with appropriate intent.
A runner must be able to point at the person whom they're chasing or being chased by to avoid a fine.
A runner must be able to point at the person whom they're chasing or being chased by to avoid a fine.
wild greens
Well-known member
I tend to average about 12000 steps a day Monday-Friday- mostly just walking around sites- then relatively fuck all distance of a weekend. A peak last month of 15483 last Wednesday but i did have three teams to manage so was a lot of running around
The heart rate counter is the the crucial bit I think, I get on the weights a couple of times a week and that doesn't really do much anymore but a bit of hot yoga or ashtanga will send it flying up. Boxing cardio sessions can be an absolute killer but i havent done those for a whole
Me & the lad go swimming at the weekend and i would like to see the difference that makes but i dont want to break the watch despite the alleged "waterproof" seal
I'm not sure i could go back to not using one of these; despite becoming a luddite and trying to turn away from being online these things are great motivation tools more than anything & have certainly forced my hand into getting out of a lazier life. Still got some of the visceral fat side-effects from 10 years of mental party lifestyle to get rid of though
Theyre good i think
The heart rate counter is the the crucial bit I think, I get on the weights a couple of times a week and that doesn't really do much anymore but a bit of hot yoga or ashtanga will send it flying up. Boxing cardio sessions can be an absolute killer but i havent done those for a whole
Me & the lad go swimming at the weekend and i would like to see the difference that makes but i dont want to break the watch despite the alleged "waterproof" seal
I'm not sure i could go back to not using one of these; despite becoming a luddite and trying to turn away from being online these things are great motivation tools more than anything & have certainly forced my hand into getting out of a lazier life. Still got some of the visceral fat side-effects from 10 years of mental party lifestyle to get rid of though
Theyre good i think
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shakahislop
Well-known member
it's a disease
quantification of everything has accelerated with the phones and internet etc
the height obsession for example. or also salaries and money are in one sense a practical aspect of life. but they are also something symbolic. people googling the average salary for their area and benchmarking their success against that. maximum bench presses. the togs on your sleeping bag. number of citations on your paper. number of people you've slept with. it's not normal.
there's a million things going on there. the anglo world in particular pushes ever closer towards quantification. partly its because the science nerds are winning, their skills are in demand, they become more and more powerful.
real life experience is mostly qualitative
shakahislop
Well-known member
the absolute worst quantification is the american-originated thing of rating people out of ten. has this ever happened in any other culture anywhere on the planet in history? it's hard to think of examples. and it's a product of perhaps the 00s, at a guess, not something deep-rooted. the cleverest thing the red scare girls go on about is the binary vs the out of ten scale.
shakahislop
Well-known member
really we should be making quantitative things qualitative. what a particularly salary can practically achieve. how running 10k makes you feel. focusing on affects rather than numbers.
Something like this came up in the book I'm reading.
"America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count."