Excel is your best friend
I’m afraid some tech-bros will keep pushing until the whole world subscribes to their lifestyle. They won’t stop until every single little village in my remote Algerian motherland eats gluten-free bagels and uses some application to measure their sleep. They won’t stop until everything you can do for its own sake is justified by a metric, so you can build a dataset, and then train some algorithms on that. As I am talking, some start-up owners and tech figures are sharing their sleep score screenshots, bragging about their 8 hours of sleep … What the actual fuck?
They will just never stop, and that thing is starting to piss me off.
As I mentioned in a previous article, one thing that - in my opinion - makes the tech world slightly unbearable is its total incapacity to appreciate the serendipity of life, and the fact that some things exist just because they exist. I have no explanations for why my grandmother's omelette tastes different even if I cook it the same way, nor do I know why somebody I have nothing in common with sounds more attractive than a top-tier profile right out of some Ivy League university. I have no idea about that, and to be totally fair, I just don’t give a single fuck. Life can be beautifully mysterious, and some mysteries shall remain mysteries. I don’t think everything should be reduced to an Excel table.
Now that I officially sound like a teenager, and you are convinced I am some anti-social sociopath, I will try to dig into that tendency, and what it means for society … and obviously why it is a complete disaster, in my opinion.
Spurious correlations … everywhere
It is no secret: we've never had a better ability to measure things, and to gather data on pretty much everything. We give away personal data on an hourly basis, and voluntarily link it to behavioral patterns, making sure some computer scientist can unfold the secret of living somewhere in California. However, I am afraid our ability to gather data and the explosion of IoT have only made us better at drawing one-dimensional charts and superimposing them to find spurious correlations absolutely everywhere.
As our ability to build massive datasets has grown exponentially, our particular talent to interpret those data has remained quite constant. Yes, in spite of machine learning models and amazing tools that have been built, I do believe we have not gotten any better when it comes to data interpretation. In fact, most machine learning models do not come with a solid and reliable way of interpreting data. The emergence of large language models with billions of parameters doesn't make things any better. We are better at computing, somehow better at predicting, but quite worse at explaining, and totally lost when it comes to interpreting.
Everyone with a smartphone now has some easy-to-access analytical dashboard; every random fitness influencer is becoming a data analyst, bringing to the world their groundbreaking findings on creatine, sleep, carbohydrates, and meat-free hamburgers. And here comes the big issue: most people trying to interpret data don’t know what they are talking about.
Before explaining that weird phenomenon, let me define first what a spurious correlation is. According to Investopedia: a spurious correlation (or spuriousness) refers to a connection between two variables that appears to be causal but is not. With spurious correlation, any observed dependencies between variables are merely due to chance or are both related to some unseen confounder.
Basically, if I feel better when I wear blue socks, it is probably due to some external factors that have nothing to do with me wearing blue socks, even though both curves perfectly match. The same way, influencers try to instrumentalize their happiness and emotional health and relate it to some precise hours of sleep or percentage of carbohydrates: those are pretty much all spurious correlations. Worse, when they try to measure non-tangible variables like happiness and emotional health, they reduce the most complex traits of human beings to one-dimensional curves, and correlate them to a flawed, non-related at all, other one-dimensional curve.
One-dimensional world
The drama here is quite subtle; it doesn’t lie in the simple fact that some people are trying to measure and explain everything, overfitting models to their beliefs, making sure they never contradict what they are thinking in the first place. The drama here lies in the fact that we try to make the unmeasurable quantifiable, then seek social validation out of that, to make sure the whole original process is totally flawed. Let me explain it with a simple example: a good meal with some good friends.
Let's consider a group of hardcore measurists at a dinner table. They are good friends with each other, and believe that everything in life worth a penny should be tracked, quantified, compared, computed, and possibly predicted. Then it might be shared online so some lost soul with sufficient herd mentality will follow the same process.
It is no secret that a good dinner with some good friends is a valuable moment, something you will regret not doing more often when you get older. Sharing some good Mediterranean dishes at the end of the afternoon, drinking mint lemonade and listening to the latest gossip is a life-changing experience that makes me live longer. I do appreciate it beyond all measurable things. However, let's come back to our group of measurists. Based on their beliefs, this dinner should be enriched with the following steps:
Count calories, and make sure your meal fits some nutri-guru menu with a fixed percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, and sugars.
Make sure your whole dinner consists of measuring your ability to follow that ridiculous template, instead of just getting genuinely interested in spending time with other humans.
Reduce that dinner to a simple accomplishment, fitting a one-dimensional flawed view: "keto dinner with a group of friends."
Share it online using complex words, reducing your social experience to a simple number of likes. Make sure you say you never been so healthy and happy in your whole life.
Happiness is not a measurable one-dimensional variable, neither is health. Life is too complex to be reduced to a few simple metrics.
Your ideal time of sleep is when you wake up with energy.
Your ideal number of calories is when you don’t feel bloated and are still in shape.
You may actually be out of shape, and be very happy.
Slim people also die.
If sharing it online brings value to the experience, then the experience is worthless.
The short path to happiness and emotional health only leads humans to miserable emotional states.
If you do it to post it, don’t do it.
Don’t post your meals.
Post your booty instead.
Love,
Voss.