We all make thousands of small decisions each day–whether to snooze a few extra minutes in the morning, how long a workout to have, whether to snack on carrots or cookies, whether to have decaf or regular coffee–that may affect our immediate and future well-being. We get some immediate feedback on some of those decisions (geez, those carrots were tasty), but detailed quantitative feedback on immediate and delayed effects is challenging.<\/p>\n
Many such decisions have immediate, identifiable, bioelectrical and biochemical signatures. Imagine a device that automatically tracked and uploaded this information, standard metrics of body function (e.g., pulse, breathing rate, temperature, bp), and manually-inputted subjective measures of well-being (e.g., headache, euphoria, anxiety, zone) and productivity. Imagine using all this information and a decent stats package to make inferences about the effects–specific to oneself–of many of life’s small decisions. Many of the inferences would be obvious and well-known: sleeping very little makes you sluggish; eating carrots makes you feel virtuous; talking with dear old friends makes you elegiac, reflective, and happy.<\/p>\n
For a device that would track lots of bio-indicators automatically and make it easy to track food intake, exercise info, and subjective variables on the fly, I doubt I’d blink about paying $10,000. Such a device would give me far better tools for enhancing my own productivity and well-being. Maybe my dear old friends also profoundly believe in me, motivating me to do more good; those carrots can give me spates of indigestion, making them less virtuous; and blogging occasionally loosens the chains and accelerates my other writing. I’d like to run the stats, controlling for daylight hours, age, the weather, the number of seminars I’ve been attending, and my overall workload, see the results, and adjust accordingly. Explicit experimentation could come soon after. Just a 1% increase in productivity would make the gadget pay well within my lifetime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We all make thousands of small decisions each day–whether to snooze a few extra minutes in the morning, how long a workout to have, whether to snack on carrots or cookies, whether to have decaf or regular coffee–that may affect our immediate and future well-being. We get some immediate feedback on some of those decisions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[415,291,990],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-science","category-vision"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}