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gwern comments on What Are You Doing for Self-Quantification? - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: hackerkiba 29 August 2012 06:14PM

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Tags: instrumental self-quantification

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Comment author: gwern 29 August 2012 07:19:15PM *  8 points [-]
  1. Zeo sleep tracker
  2. Every morning I write down on 2 index cards a number 1-5 about the previous day, mood/productivity and creativity.
  3. Then I write down my weight on the scale.
  4. a window-tracking daemon (arbtt) records computer time as spent on various windows
  5. I do spaced repetition every day, which produces some numbers which could be useful for QS, enforced by Beeminder.
  6. I'm currently doing a dual n-back/nicotine experiment, which produces another 5 numbers, also enforced by Beeminder

#1-3 is very easy, a few seconds at most when I go to bed & wake up. #4 is no effort to do after the initial setup, since it is run by a cron job. #5 is more work but is a years-old habit so really not a problem. I struggle with #6.

I lose my pedometer a while ago, but I plan to order another one in a few days, which I will add to #1-2/the index cards. Other than that, I think this is a sustainable routine and useful for future experiments.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 15 February 2013 07:22:28AM *  0 points [-]

Are Zeos worth the price relative to other similar things? I've started using Sleep Cycle, and while I don't expect it to be anywhere near as accurate, I don't know if the difference in accuracy is worth ~$250.

Comment author: gwern 15 February 2013 07:17:14PM 1 point [-]

Apparently the current product most equivalent to the bedside unit I use is the Zeo Sleep Manager Pro which is ~$90. I don't know how accurate it is compared to Sleep Cycle: I think some of the Zeo papers compare with standard sleep accelerometers but it seems like every cellphone accelerometer product (there are tons because it's so easy to write) does things a bit differently.

Comment author: Metus 30 August 2012 06:27:30AM 0 points [-]

What kind of pedometer did you use and how accurate do you think it was?

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2012 02:26:43PM 2 points [-]

A cheap Radioshack one I found lying around the house; I don't think it was very accurate, but I was more interested in trends and relative amounts than an absolute accuracy.

Comment author: palladias 29 August 2012 07:23:12PM 0 points [-]

I don't know what "a dual n-back/nicotine experiment" is. Could you expand?

Comment author: gwern 06 November 2012 08:06:10PM 2 points [-]

See http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#experiment-1 for the full writeup (I just finished analyzing it today).

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