Rationally Speaking #125 - The Quantified Self

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2015

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

People have been keeping track of their moods, sleeping, dietary habits and more for hundreds of years -- Benjamin Franklin famously recorded instances of his virtues and vices. But only in the last decade has the rise of smartphones and fast computing created the new "Quantified Self" movement in which some people are trying to mine their own data for insights about how to be happier and more effective. In this episode, Massimo and Julia discuss self tracking -- what you can learn from it, and what its pitfalls might be.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPTICs.org.
0:30.8	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:40.4	I'm your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:44.8	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.4	Massimo, our topic for this episode is Quantified Self, which is a relatively new movement to track tons of data about our moods and our
1:01.2	performance or productivity or energy levels and all the various factors that might be affecting
1:07.3	those states and outputs like how much we slept or what we ate, et cetera, et cetera.
1:12.8	So this movement was, well, the term quantified self was officially coined less than 10 years ago.
1:20.5	I think it was 2008 by a couple editors of Wired named Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly.
1:26.2	Why doesn't that surprise me?
1:27.8	Right. Of course, people have been tracking. Wired named Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly. Why doesn't that surprise me? Wired magazine.
1:28.0	Right?
1:36.1	Of course, people have been tracking data of some sort about themselves for thousands of years.
1:36.9	Yeah, no.
1:45.0	San Augustine, for instance, was complaining about women that kept track of their menstrual cycles in order to avoid to get pregnant. Yeah, well, yeah, because if you do it in order not to get pregnant, that's not a good idea, according to Augustine.
1:50.0	Wow, they are really defining birth control very broadly. That is tough. The old example that I had in mind is not quite as old as Augustine.
2:01.0	I was thinking of Ben Franklin, who, you know, kept a lot of, well, he kept a journal,
2:06.3	and he tracked a lot of things about his life or his moods.
2:11.2	And there were these 13 personal virtues that he kept track of, like how well he was following those virtues.
2:17.3	And he wrote that he was surprised that he had how well he was following those virtues. And he wrote that he
2:18.2	was surprised that he had so many more faults than he thought, but that tracking them nonetheless
	...

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