Shortly after Blue Fairy gives life to the eponymous wooden puppet in the 1940 classic animated film Pinocchio, she instructs him that he must, “Always let [his] conscience be [his] guide”. Were she a rationalist, she might have added an important addendum: “And make decisions based upon objective, high-quality, third-party-recorded data to remove your own bias as much as possible or else your decisions will be clouded by quirks of neurology. That new brain I gave you isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Taking this approach lets you identify what is happening, rather than what you think is happening. It can change your life. It can change your business. It can give you freedom and affluence. That’s the reason I constantly remind myself of the twin gospels of Galileo (“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”) and Henry Ford (“That which can be measured can be managed.”); why Aaron and I love data. Whether it’s daily sales, annual dividend income, our share of look-through earnings of a particular business, measuring recipes by gram weight on a food scale, tracking our calories, comparing our daily steps, keeping tabs on our Internet usage for efficiency, home energy use patterns, minutes spoken on a phone every month, average text messages by line, hours logged in Civilization V, or average miles per gallon on the car, if it can be tracked, odds are we track it. We also review it periodically to find areas we can improve. Doing this empowers us to make trade-off decisions about what we actually want rather than what we want right now. Over time, things get better and better because inertia does most of the work. It gives us a mechanism to structure our lives so that we can be certain every night when we get into bed, we’ve ended the day, to borrow a sentiment, “a little richer, a little wiser”, and having done something we enjoyed.
This philosophy makes it easier to take control of situations because you can step outside of yourself and monitor your progress toward your primary mission as if you were a third-party. When you learn to think about objective data, you remember the lesson Benjamin Graham gave seventy years ago: “Criterion based upon adjectives are necessarily ambiguous.” You no longer say, “I type pretty fast”, you instead say, “I type around _____ words per minute with ___ percent accuracy.” You no longer say, “I should keep a little money in the bank for emergency funds,” you say, “Based on a worst-case scenario, I should have at least $_____ in the bank at all times to survive a six-month period with no income of any kind.” You no longer say, “I think sales were up around 20%”, you say, “We increased by $______ over last year, which is exactly ___%. The increase came ___% from higher volume, ___% from per product revenues, and ___% from increased customer conversions, with a ___% adjustment for currency translations.” Good data is like turning a light on the room when you are fumbling with a puzzle. It makes everything so much easier.
Your fellow man benefits, too. That clarity makes you a better citizen, a more effective leader, and less susceptible to manipulation because you’re working from a more accurate premise. Let’s look at just a few real-world examples.
Examples of How Data Can Reveal a Different Reality Than Perception Might Lead One to Believe
We’ve talked at least two dozen times over the past 5 years about the fact that murders, assaults, rapes, teen pregnancies, and abortions are near all-time lows. Yet, people don’t believe it because there is now widespread media so an event that would never have been noticed in the past is reported around the globe in real-time. In other words, the frequency of events is declining substantially but the frequency one hears about the events has increased, leading to a perception that is factually inaccurate. That can be a source of comfort; knowing that things are actually better and improving, not worse and declining.
In particular, the gun debate here in the United States is rife with irrational, non-data-driven beliefs, many of which we discussed in a post called Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. In fact, gun deaths are the lowest they have been in generations.
Another is the idea that white, middle class students are somehow disadvantaged when it comes to college financial aid. The real world data leads one to the opposite conclusion. Despite making up only 62% of the higher education student population, white students receive 76% of all merit-based scholarship. When you look beyond merit-based scholarship to need-based scholarship, minority students received more need-based assistance not because they were minorities but because their families were significantly poorer; race was inconsequential to how the checks were allocated, it was all about your family’s taxable income. To be specific, “83.0% of African-American students” and “79.6% of Latino students” were low-income. For the white students, only 55.3% were considered low income in the financial aid based calculations. Even among the poor, this advantage existed with poor white families earning $22,217 compared to $20,053 for poor minority students. (Source PDF)
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How are you doing economically? A lot of people don’t have a clue where they fall even though you can pull the Federal Reserve and Census data to determine where your income and net worth put you in relation to your fellow citizens. For example, if the head of your household is 45-54 years old and you make less than $5,083 per month, you are in the bottom half of society when it comes to income; if you have a net worth of less than $117,900 you are in the bottom half of society when it comes to equity.
How are you doing health-wise? A lot of people have no idea what 2,000 calories looks like. As we discussed last month, this, in turn, has created a reference problem where obesity has become so common, many people have become desensitized to the point they believe severely fat people are normal or only slightly overweight; they’re literally unable to tell you what a healthy body size looks like! I didn’t mention it at the time but a couple of weeks prior, a study was published in the British Journal of General Practice that showed this extends to parent-child relationships. The situation is so bad it’s almost hard to believe. For a child in the 98th weight percentile – something that would have been considered grotesque and worthy of intervention not that long ago – an unfathomable 80 out of 100 parents believed the kid was normal weight. Because the parents are ranking their kids based on other kids and not on an impartial, mathematical standard, they are like a ship lost at sea, floating without a northern star to guide them. It’s like living in a mad house these days. If you’re a 5’4″ woman, and you weigh 175 pounds, you are not overweight. You are not a little chunky. You are not thick. You’re medically obese. No matter what you tell yourself, you will die younger than you should. Your life will be worse than it otherwise would have been. You will be paid less. You will be treated more poorly due to subconscious, evolutionary prejudices that happen before the conscious mind can even be aware it’s happening. (Doubt it? Ask someone who lost a large amount of weight, particularly a woman, how differently the world treated her before and after the transformation.) Just as relevant, there is a wide body of academic evidence with studies like this one going back decades that show overweight men and women, on the whole, do not have slower metabolisms, they just suck at math. They consistently under-estimate their own caloric intake and eat far more than they think they do. It’s a data problem. They aren’t measuring correctly.
Data can reveal all of the incorrect assumptions from which you might be operating. As odd as it seems, some truths are just outright counterintuitive, like boiling water freezing faster than cold water. Imagine your daughter in London came to you and said, “I want to start a business selling sand to Saudi Arabia!” or your son in Sydney called you and excitedly declared, “I want to start a farm that sells camels to Saudi Arabia!”. People operating from assumption wouldn’t realize this isn’t as crazy as it sounds because Saudi Arabia already imports its camels from Australia and most of its construction sand from England. It seems absurd on its face but Australian camels have a higher ratio of fat, making them better for culinary consumption, and English sand is better suited as a construction material, making it superior for building.
People today lament how they are busier than ever, but it’s not true. The average person living in the United States has an extra 5 hours of leisure time per week than their parents and 40 more hours of leisure time per week than their great grandparents. You can thank the lowly washing machine, electric stove, microwave, vacuum cleaner, coffee maker, and computer for that. In fact, the washing machine by itself has probably done more to increase human happiness than anything Congress has done in the past 50 years. It changed the world. Sadly, as most investors or employees with ties to media can tell you, the average American abuses this gift. He or she now spends an unfathomable 34 hours per week watching television and 6 hours a week watching DVR or other recorded shows, for a total of 40 hours a week. All of the gains given to the typical person as an inheritance on the efforts of our ancestors didn’t go to living a better, more productive life, but rather sitting on a couch and watching fake people live fake lives. They are completely blowing the 27,375 day trust fund they’ve been given. They could be leveling up their skills like a video game character; learning to cook, traveling, picking up another language, working on an invention, developing a hybrid plant, running, lifting weights, swimming, beekeeping, writing a visual novel for release on Steam, or even learning about history and performing in in accurate reenactments of Civil War battles; anything that made them, as a person, better.
Sure, watching television is fine occasionally – I, myself, make no secret of my must-be-managed addiction to Korean dramas and even occasionally fall off the wagon to binge for an entire afternoon (what can I say? Every once in awhile, I’m a sucker for love stories that revolve around corporate fights for shareholder control among closely held family corporations … what other culture routinely features grandparents extracting double-digit interest rates from their grandchildren when they make a mistake in inventory purchases, blowing through their working capital or demanding all inherited common stock plus accumulated past dividends back as punishment for marrying someone deemed non-suitable for the family’s social status?) – but we’re talking 2,080 hours per person, per year. That is an insane way to waste your life. A married couple committing this sin misemploys 4,160 hours per year. There is probably no worse, widely accepted way, to obliterate the potential of your two buckets. It’s nearly impossible to get ahead in life if you behave like this. Successful people tend to avoid it like the plague. The more affluent your family is, the less television you watch. If all you did was go for a run in a nearby park and listen to a non-fiction audiobook while you did, in several years, your life is going to be better; slowly, naturally improved as the good decisions compound in the same way money grows. You’ll know more. You’ll be healthier. You’ll feel better. You’ll look more attractive. All of these things reinforce themselves in a virtuous cycle, one victory amplifying another in a positive feedback loop.
The Interconnected Nature of Life Means You Can Spark Positive, or Negative, Feedback Loops
It’s all connected. Your life, right now, reflects the sum total culmination of your past life decisions. Of course, everyone has different starting positions at birth but as Volatire aptly observed, “Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game”. If you don’t like your life, start making better decisions. Every action you take, no matter how small, puts you closer or further away from the man or woman you want to be. Nobody living in a free society – and practically all Western Democracies are at the moment – has any excuse unless they have some sort of severe mental illness that interferes with their functioning or suffer black swan event that wipes them off the board. By nearly every measurable historical metric, we won the lottery. Accept that there is no cavalry coming to save you. The world will be perfectly content to let you squander your potential and die completely miserable. It’s agnostic to your feelings. It will rarely give you more than you demand of it. The sooner you acknowledge, and internalize, that basic truth, the sooner you can begin arranging your life according to whatever vision you have, whether that’s living in a 900 square foot cabin off the grid in a self-sufficient mountain hideaway or working in high finance in one of the major global trade centers. You have to be both architect and CEO. If you don’t make some carefully calculated, driven, missile-guided decisions toward what it is you want, you probably aren’t going to get it. There are very few Chauncey Gardners walking around and you probably aren’t one of them.
That’s one of the secrets to getting what you want.
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Why is this on my mind? For the past year, I’ve been going over a question posed to me by one of you (Angie) in this comment thread, asking, “you stress a lot on positive feedback loop, Joshua. And I understand why. Its power is incredible. What advice do you have for someone who is stuck in a negative feedback loop?”, as well as another, similar question to which I promised a response but the specific link eludes me at the moment.
Despite not serving as a complete answer, after all of this time, picking it up almost daily and reflecting on it, I’m convinced the most efficient way to kickstart the process, the very first step before you can actually do anything, is measurement. You have to know how, exactly, you are allocating your time, money, and other resources so you can acknowledge reality. Everything stems from that. Although I’ve restricted the construct to making money in the past, the two levers model is really true for most things. It’s inputs and outputs. Figuring out, specifically, where the imbalances are, and tweaking those, can set off the compounding cycle on the upside. I’d begin measuring all things that can be measured. How many hours a day are you in front of a computer and what are you actually doing when looking at the screen (buy software to track it so you can replay months’ worth of data logs to see yourself as if you were an employee)? What time do you wake up? What time do you go to bed? How many hours per week are you sleeping? How many times do you wake up in the middle of the night? What do you weigh? How many calories do you consume? How many hours of accelerated heart rate activity do you engage in per week? How many grams of sugar go into your body in a given day? How much alcohol do you consume? What are you commuting costs per mile and as a percentage of your after-tax earnings? What is the cost of capital for all of your debt balances? How many hours a month do you devote to educational reading (actually sitting in silence somewhere, with no distractions, and a book in front of you)? When was the last time – what, and how frequently – you engaged in “deliberate practice” to attain a skill?
With the technology available today, most of this requires almost no effort to answer. The frictional time loss for monitoring should be negligible or you’re doing it wrong.
Record it all. Let a 2-3 month pattern develop and you’ll see who you really are, not who you think you are. (What was it Aristotle said? “We are what we repeatedly do?”) This is true because it is the nature of the universe that you can’t accomplish a thing directly, you can only make decisions that kick start a process that, in turn, naturally leads to a given result. I’ve explain this concept in the past on the site; how you can’t, actually, bake a pie. Instead, you can combine butter, sugar, flour, and shortening to create a crust, fill it with apple slices, and put it in the oven. The pie is the outcome; the by-product of the process. Thus, to make the perfect pie, you have to focus on the sub-processes and the pie will take care of itself. Life is the same way. You can’t “get rich”, you have to let fewer dollars go out the door than flow in the door, building a surplus. The wealth that accumulates is the by-product of those decisions. You can’t “lose 100 pounds”. Rather, you have to eat fewer calories than your body burns. The deficit that arises naturally consumes your fat stores until you reach equilibrium. Make the right decision every day – and focus solely on today and today only – and the rest falls into place. You can’t beat a video game. You play through it, getting stronger battle by battle, level up by level up, with the “winning” being a by-product that happens as a result of all of those countless individual decisions along the journey. All of those little choices you make – every single one of them – nudges you closer or further away to the life you want to live. You have to know what choices you are making; the choices that your brain considers so inconsequential it doesn’t even remember them the next day. The answer to why your life is the way it is sits in that data. Everything from your home, your body, your education, your friends, your bank balance … those are all symptoms of the decisions.
Two final warnings, though:
- It is important that you are measuring the right things
- Not everything that is important or vital can be measured. Do not try to shove into quantitative statistics things that are too intangible.
That and mirrors. I don’t have time to explain at the moment (it’d make an interesting follow-up post someday) but there are all sorts of fascinating psychology studies on everything from increases in honesty to other behavioral changes that are tied to seeing your own reflection accidentally. It is an incredible behavioral modification technique that borders on hard to believe because it’s so simple but do it. Put full length mirrors everywhere in your home and office. See yourself how you are and you’ll change small things, without even realizing it, compounding them into big wins. It helps you get outside of your head.
I’m still working on my formal answer but this is step one; the basic foundation without which the rest is probably going to be useless. It will probably take me four or five different posts, each looking at a different aspect of the problem, sequentially, before I can write the final summary.
Licensed Image Credit: Macrovector / Shutterstock
Reader Comments (50)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
Bob
May 15, 2015
I would say, to speak broadly, the way out of a negative feedback loop is to focus on the side effects of your actions. Your current life situation is the result of your past primary actions AND the side effects of those actions. You can never do only one thing at once! Usually negative feedback loops result from treating symptoms rather than the primary problem. Often, whatever action you chose to treat the symptom also has negative side effects, creating a downward spiral*
Examples:
1.) Borrowing money to pay bills - Treats side effect which is not having enough cash today, but root cause is poor money management.
2.) Taking blood pressure medication - treats side effect which is high blood pressure, but root cause is poor diet/exercise.
3.) Buying a more fuel efficient car to save money on gas - treats side effect which is high spending on fuel, but root cause is failure to plan location of home relative to job.
Note how the actions above have negative consequences which will cause the root problems to escalate and/or create further problems.
*see U.S. Congress for further examples
Bob
May 15, 2015
I would say, to speak broadly, the way out of a negative feedback loop is to focus on the side effects of your actions. Your current life situation is the result of your past primary actions AND the side effects of those actions. You can never do only one thing at once! Usually negative feedback loops result from treating symptoms rather than the primary problem. Often, whatever action you chose to treat the symptom also has negative side effects, creating a downward spiral*
Examples:
1.) Borrowing money to pay bills - Treats side effect which is not having enough cash today, but root cause is poor money management.
2.) Taking blood pressure medication - treats side effect which is high blood pressure, but root cause is poor diet/exercise.
3.) Buying a more fuel efficient car to save money on gas - treats side effect which is high spending on fuel, but root cause is failure to plan location of home relative to job.
Note how the actions above have negative consequences which will cause the root problems to escalate and/or create further problems.
*see U.S. Congress for further examples
Steve
May 15, 2015
Posts like these always come around just at the right time.
Joe
May 17, 2015
Replying to Steve
I agree. Awesome post.
Bill Larson
May 15, 2015
Knowing doing gap - we know what we should do, but cave for whatever reason. Human nature. Really enjoyed reading as usual. Kennon '16!
Joshua Myers
May 15, 2015
I read this question (and your reply) 6 months ago and have been waiting for the answer since. It was well worth the wait. Very concrete and inspiring.
Andrew
May 15, 2015
Do you have any recommendation for software that tracks exactly what you're doing on your computer to replay and watch later? I know you have mentioned this in the past.
Steve
May 15, 2015
Replying to Andrew
I would also like to know some recommendations.
Em
May 16, 2015
Replying to Steve
Rescuetime.com is a popular option.
Joshua Kennon
May 16, 2015
Replying to Andrew
We use this company because at the time we went for the first license, it was one of the few with capabilities just as good on Mac-based systems but I'm sure there are other alternatives out there. If you consider the consumer version of the software for home or a personal system, keep in mind that it is a 2 or 3 year subscription (read the terms!) and they'll auto-charge you the purchase price again every 24 or 36 months or the software will go dead. This isn't as terrible as it sounds considering most operating systems change sufficiently to make upgrades necessary, anyway, given how deeply embedded it is to track everything from document usage to time patterns to keylogging.
Mr.owenr
May 16, 2015
I've been watching Dr. Clotaire Rapaille and the Triune brain theory. He would say something like 'the reptilian always wins.' I have a hard time reconciling that with Joshua's many posts which suggest that decisions can be made based upon data. Can anyone point me to a study that shows when humans are presented with data and given the chance to make a primitive or emotional choice they will choose the former option?
Badkins
May 16, 2015
Replying to Mr.owenr
I don't think anything here contradicts what Dr. Rapaille says. If anything it reinforces it. Speaking from the Daniel Kahneman "System 1 and System 2" theory of how our brains process information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory#System_1
where System 1 is automatic and intuitive, and System 2 is deliberate and rational, focusing on hard numbers and data is meant to circumvent the reptilian brain, forcing us to process information consciously and rationally. It is difficult precisely because our brains default to System 1 processing when it isn't appropriate.
I know several people, and Joshua seems to be one of them, that find it far easier to "switch" to System 2 than do most of us. I've gotten better at it, but it requires mindfulness, and like most things, gets easier (or less difficult) with practice. I have no specific studies to reference for you, however Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is of course filled with such examples.
Joshua Kennon
May 16, 2015
Replying to Mr.owenr
For me, personally, in my own life:
1. The data tells me what to target.
2. When I actually go to change something, how I target it is straight up Rapaille/reptilian manipulation. I know how to motivate/demotivate my own psychology with everything from changes in light color, music, scent, dietary plans, clothing, and surroundings. I know which codes to use for myself; which buttons to push.
For example, one technique that works tremendously well for me given my affinity for video games is "gamifying" my life as if I were in an RPG or playing the Sims. I'm able to step outside of my head a "play" myself like I were a video game character.
Another one I use, adapted from comedian Jerry Seinfeld, is "don't break the chain". I use the data to figure out what I want to change. Then I calculate what I need to do every day, in a single 24 hour period - the small stuff - that if I repeat long enough, what I want will naturally occur. I then put it into a spreadsheet for, say, 100 days. I make my list of conditions: (e.g., "Walk 1 mile or more today / Do not eat more than 2,000 calories / read for knowledge acquisition for one hour / practice cooking one new thing" etc. etc.
Then, every single day, without exception, each condition I meet satisfactory gets an X next to it. You go a few days, and you have this string of X's. If you manage to not break the chain - no days without an X - you will get there. It cannot be avoided. Whether it's amassing more money, losing weight, starting another business, redecorating a house; whatever. It removes all of the cognitive load. After the program is designed, you don't have to think about anything except "Did I build the chain today? There are no breaks? Day = Success!" It requires almost no higher thought, which is one of the reasons it's so efficient.
Successful people do this - manipulate their own reptilian mind - quite often. I recall one entrepreneur who designed an arch-enemy competitor like a comic book. They named it, gave it a logo, and would regularly have meetings about their "perfect" opponent, trying to guess the sorts of things it was doing. They then used this to identify their own strategy and took off like a rocket ship. I can't recall the name of the firm at the moment but it's somewhere in my case study files because I was so impressed by it. He knew that just being good wasn't motivation enough. He had to feel like he was under attack; that his business was going to be taken from him.
Quarterback Joe Montana used to say that he figured out that many other competitors were motivated by winning. For him, his secret was discovering that at his core, he was terrified of losing; of not being good enough; of being a failure. That was what drove him, by playing off that emotion. The stats / game play videos / data of what worked, what didn't work was just a tool. The motivation and self-manipulation is a secondary part that is just as vital.
Know thyself. Manipulate thyself. The data provides the guideposts; a sort of report card and/or map to tell you how you're doing/where you should be going. The motivation, at least in my sense, comes from knowing my own codes so I know which buttons to press and strings to pull, as well as designing inertia systems that do the heavy lifting for me.
Abe
May 22, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
I imagine this question can likely lead to an article all on its own, but I have to ask none the less:
You state that you KNOW what "codes to use...[and] which buttons to push." But, how would a person who is unaware of their "buttons/codes" go about systematically identifying them? Better phrased, if you were unaware of what motivates/demotivates you and you wanted to construct a system to gain that knowledge, what would your system look like?
Mr.owenr
June 10, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Thank you Joshua. I think I get it.
In fact I picked up "Don't break the chain" and applied it to my (at the time non existent) weight lifting schedule. Seeing three weeks of X's on the wall is a very powerful motivator for me.
dave (nestle)
May 16, 2015
Joshua(or anybody/everybody else), what would you do if you "woke up" at your age of 32 and discovered that you wanted to live a mostly data driven life? You craved knowledge and a better way to live. That you wanted to use data to make all decisions for all the good reasons listed above. However, let's say, your family or friends or spouse or business relationships/coworkers (whoever in your relationships that directly affected you) were only emotionally driven people. People who refuse to see data, or use data correctly to get the outcomes they say they want. People who may not even agree or see that they are wasting their lives, or that their lives could be so much better, or that their hours are running out? Maybe they are just not intelligent enough to process what you are showing them, data-wise. It's not their fault. However, you find yourself joined with them. It eats at you that you are surrounded by "idiots". At least in the sense that they don't want to better themselves. Its the same old, same old. Not moving forward.
I guess it's easy enough to say you would clean up your life, but would you really? What would you do? Especially if everyday the same thoughts were on your mind, the same incompatibility of your relationships, but the same people were still around. Would you just disappear cold turkey like? Leave your spouse? Abandon your friends? Would you become more of an isolationist? Let's face it (at least in my estimation), to set up a "new" life at 32 with all new people which fit your requirements, even if you could justify it morally (which I might argue would be the hardest hurdle), would be nearly impossible. Just finding many rational and intelligent and open people, I mean, forget it. Would you find a happy medium?
All hypothetical situations, of course.
Thoughts?
Eric
May 16, 2015
Replying to dave (nestle)
I wrestle with that all the time. I think sometimes it's a good idea to have silent goals that only you know about.
dave (nestle)
May 17, 2015
Replying to Eric
Agree. I personally have found a happy medium in life and am able to identify when data/facts are to be used, or not.
(addendum to original post: I have not given the context in which I posed the scenario)
Steve Roberts
May 18, 2015
Replying to dave (nestle)
Excellent question.....how do you find that rational, intelligent and open minded people? This blog is great, but I can't invite Josh over for dinner 🙂 And he'd probably judge me as emotionally driven anyways....
I've tracked our family's car expenses for 15 years. I know exactly what each mile driven costs. There is a reason I walked to work for 8+ years and now drive 2.5 miles one way. If I got a new job 20 miles away I would move. Yet most people don't care that it costs an average of $0.58/mile for the vehicle they are driving and they don't "mind" driving 20 miles one way sitting in traffic for 40 minutes....what a quick way to destroy your two buckets every day.
Zaphod
May 18, 2015
Replying to Steve Roberts
Funny, I walked to work for years and every time I've moved around the country I've never lived more than a couple miles from work. You never get that time back, never.
Eric
May 28, 2015
Replying to Steve Roberts
Yea, I think Edmunds did a study a few years ago that said the average person spends $8,000 a year for the privilege of owning a car. It's a nutty expense that most will just shrug off and not think about alternatives. On the other hand... a lot of people work in areas that they would not live within walking distance of. Or there might not be infrastructure that allows you to get to work by foot. Or you might want to be insulated from the people you work around. Or you live in a place with a bad climate where you need the protection from the weather.
Steve Roberts
May 31, 2015
Replying to Eric
Remember the IRS reimbursement rate for 2015 is 57.5 cents/mile. That's an AVERAGE rate.Some vehicles cost more than that to operate. I wonder if it's a median rate.....I should research this more.
Zaphod
May 18, 2015
Replying to dave (nestle)
Now hopefully your partner and you have such a relationship that this makes sense to both of you and are doing this as a team.
As for the rest, 32 is super young and its unlikely your current social/work/etc...will stay intact over the next 5-10 years anyway, so this is really a false choice. People and lives are dynamic. Aside from a very few very close friends, all my acquaintances are different than when I was 32. Some people you miss but usually family/work play an even larger role in that than how you view the world.
That said, having grown up in an extremely poor and dysfunctional family, I dont keep in contact with that side of the family on any kind of a regular basis whatsoever. Its simply unhealthy and theres no benefit. I realize society says I should feel badly about that but it doesnt bother me a bit. You have a limited time on this earth, no need to spend it with those that dont enrich you on some level just because you share a relative. Its all a matter of degree anyway, at some point we're all related.
Actually just spent a weekend with one of these cherished friends, and was disturbed at a couple of seemingly quick off hand remarks over the time. I was deeply saddened by this, even though it was just a couple of words and an observation...it bothers me and hopefully they come around to being more reasonable, or we will have a discussion about it. Friends dont let friends be irrational or narrow minded.
dave (nestle)
May 20, 2015
Replying to Zaphod
Zaphod, Steve and Eric,
Since I have no power to upvote your responses, please accept two "thumbs-up" and mad "respect" each! I appreciate your thoughts. Very solid thoughts! (and please don't take me for some loon on the edge, as I'm not referring to myself at all, ha ha)
Joshua Kennon
May 20, 2015
Replying to dave (nestle)
[Random question from the admin panel: Disqus shows you as a logged-in registered user. Why can't you upvote? It should be enable for you since you aren't using the guest setting ...]
dave (nestle)
May 20, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Hi Joshua,
Im definately not a logged in user and I always have used the reply as a guest feature. I know that disqus has changed the rules since you let me know. I dont know what you are seeing on your end.
Actually I am out and read your question on my iphone and actually tried to upvote your question and it said i must be logged in to upvote. It also took me to a new window to set up an account(a new feature i guess).
I really should just come out of my cave and set up an account. That is if you want me around. Haha. Have a great night!!
dave (nestle)
May 20, 2015
Replying to Zaphod
You see,
It appears to me that after the thousands and thousands of conversations and interactions with many many people in all aspects of my life, that the overwhelming majority of them did not set up their lives with data as the basis. Then after a decade or two they find themselves looking to make drastic changes. Extreme frugal living, divorce, etc. I find that most people who are data driven morph into that after making mistakes or wrong choices as young adults which cause them to wake up. I am talking about the few people who really actually wake up.
I have read the articles here about choosing your relationships wisely and setting up your finances properly at a very young age. While I find it amazing that the main man here got all his ducks in a row from the beginning (especially the choice of a perfect fit of a spouse), it certainly does not seem like the norm for most people. I admit that I also had great luck in finding a perfect girl to marry (She actually got the short end of the stick as you all can tell), but the majority of my friends did not. Same with finances.
So in a nutshell, and without any sound Harvard surveys, it seems to me that most people who accept the power of using data to change their lives do so after they already set themselves up in a negative situation. The change then may have far greater reaches than just personal betterment.(and that goes for the person doing the changes also)
Anyway...
Zaphod
May 22, 2015
Replying to dave (nestle)
Obviously, experience is a memorable teacher and though I wish it was not mine...indeed it was. However, I think that its still a rare individual that experiences things and then takes the introspective approach to see why things are why they are instead of placing a bunch of external blame or frankly ignoring the obvious.
Its not as pretty, but it works well in the end. I like to think about behaviors in the same way I do interest. That is its not about an overnight epiphany where you just alter your whole persona, but rather a better choice today in some part of your life, be it love, work, diet, or finances, etc...You slowly compound that choice with a better one next week, month, and year and all the sudden your choices baseline levels are miles from where you started and you're into the fine tuning phase of things. I always tell people if you try to do too much at once you increase your chances of failure and giving up, its a marathon after all. Make it simple.
Des
May 16, 2015
I could be misreading, so my apologies if I am, but it sounds like you are using the terms "positive feedback loop" and "negative feedback loop" to mean virtuous cycle and vicious cycle, but that isn't really what those terms mean. I don't think the difference is nitpicking either, since the real meaning of those terms can be quite useful:
Negative feedback (in the context of a feesback loop) is information that causes a system to respond in an opposite way. For example, a thermostat may be set to turn the heat on if the temperature is below 68°. It produces heat until the thermostat receives information that the temp is now 68°, then it stops producing heat. If it were in a positive feedback loop, it would do the opposite: it would turn the heat on whenever the temp was over 68°. A common example of a positive feedback loop is microphone feedback.
This would be a pseudo code way to write the feedback loops:
Negative:
x = 1
Do while x 0
x = x + 1
End Loop
Both of these can be useful in the right context. A positive feedback loop (runaway growth) may be desirable for investments, where a negative feedback loop (finding equilibrium) is better for weight loss.
Joshua Kennon
May 16, 2015
Replying to Des
You're correct in that you are using the term in the accurate scientific sense were we talking about system design. I'm using the colloquial as the question was posed to me (in no small part influenced by the fact the latter is ~53% more popular in search queries and is more likely to rank favorably in Google).
Though, now that you point it out, this was probably not a wise thing to do despite the higher page views given the number of engineers in the community ...
Zaphod
May 19, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
This is reminiscent of the article/comment stream where we discussed choosing words carefully and as you understand they will be interpreted by the majority of or intended audience. Sometimes its just practical and even though it can make you cringe perception>reality often times. Spending all day most days talking to people from varying walks of life you get the same feedback, and even though people say things that ultimately would make no sense out of context, you've learned their "language" and understand what they "meant" or are getting at. Weird world.
Dheeraj
May 17, 2015
Josh quickly i am discussing with my parents charity and i want to quote the bible verse that effectively says that a man that does not create trust fund for his kids and do charity is a fool ...... which one is that please
Connelly Barnes
May 17, 2015
"You have to eat fewer calories than your body burns."
Joshua, you might want to read the book Why We Get Fat: And What to do About It, which spends much of its text attacking this "calories in, calories out" thesis.
Joshua Kennon
May 17, 2015
Replying to Connelly Barnes
Despite agreeing with you (technically, you are correct), the fact remains indisputable that regardless of quality differences in calories (e.g., 100 calories of sugar or carbohydrates causes subsequent cravings that cause you to eat more later, as well as triggering an insulin response that means you store more of those calories than you would eating an exact amount of comparable steak or vegetables due to things like the thermic effect of food), the basic mathematical relationship remains absolutely true. If you run an energy deficit, you will, by definition, lose weight. Nobody is immune to physics. It's a basic law of the universe.
If you stuck a 300 pound person on an island with 1,200 calories of Snickers bars a day, and a cocktail of nutrients to avoid malnutrition, they'd be a healthy weight by the end of the year. There was a professor of nutrition at a university over the border in Kansas who wanted to scientifically demonstrate this point so he conducted a high-profile public experiment eating nothing but processed, sugary crap and counting calories. He plummeted 30 pounds in no time, walking people through the math. That is objective reality.
Being surrounded by obesity, until that truth is understood - you cannot lose weight, no matter how healthy you eat, unless the total calories you consume in a day is fewer than the total calories you burn in a day so your body has to dip into its reserves - everything else is just enabling because every other caveat is going to be twisted to justify overconsumption. It's like "BMI is a bad measure of health" ... yeah, if you are a bodybuilder or on the tail end of the distribution spectrum, which most people aren't (and don't even come close). What is a rational objection becomes a justification to feed addiction (which is what it is).
I see it every day, non-stop. It's so bad that I personally, in my own life, know people who are severely obese, eat no sugar, white flour, or processed foods, run miles and miles a week (really push themselves - sweat rolling down their body), and still haven't lost weight because their absolute caloric intakes are completely unreasonable, which they refuse to accept. They are convinced thin people are thin because of their genetics. You'll watch them eat a "healthy" meal of nothing but animal fat, protein, and non-starch vegetables (and it is - it's exactly how a person should be eating with no processed junk, no added sugar, no refined flours) but they'll be consuming a day's worth of calories in a single setting.
That is why I don't, and won't, make distinctions like the one you've drawn. Being surrounded by morbid obesity, watching the toll it takes and knowing with a high degree of certainty it is going to end the lives of some of the people I care about most decades before they should have been ended, I can say with absolute certainty, from personal experience, that most of the people I know who read what you just wrote would use it as an excuse to still gorge themselves, taking a 2nd or 4th serving because it's "healthy" or "good calories". Repeating what you've said would do far more damage that good. It will kill them sooner.
I really don't think people understand how bad the so-called "fat logic" is when someone becomes addicted to food. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
Adam
May 17, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Agreed and it's particularly hard for shorter women, who's required caloric intake to lose weight is so dramatically below what American's picture as a normal diet.
Zaphod
May 18, 2015
Replying to Adam
This is very true, they have to deal with everything they come into contact with being far too much for them. Weird that we dont make the obvious connection between amount of intake and body size.
Joshua Myers
May 17, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
"Worse, there seems to be some sort of social-proof tipping point that when a certain percentage of those in an area or network become overweight or obese, they reinforce the bad behaviors of the others, justifying excessive caloric intake (they get offended if they notice you eat like a normal person and actively sabotage anyone who attempts to break out from the disease). It makes me want to bang my head against a wall."
I know this situation intimately from my work. Eating healthy is looked on as something crazy, or unhealthy. I watch people eat mass amounts of pizza, burritos, etc, and talk about how much alcohol they drink. These same people are also physically miserable all the time, talking about how full they are, how messed up their stomachs are, or how hung over they are. Not participating in this behavior often makes you a social outcast in a very real sense. It's literally the case that engaging in healthy behaviors (such as bringing in your own cooked organic meats, fruits, vegetables, and eggs) is considered unhealthy and offensive to a lot of people.
The thing is that I see this group mentality of social-proof working in other negative ways, so I think that it's a much larger phenomenon. A large portion of society will shun a person if they opt out of the sitcom marathon and decide to read or study instead. People are also turned into social outcasts for deciding to make better financial decisions.
I've thought about this topic for a few years and I don't have a really good answer as to why people act this way. I have personally experienced all three of the examples that I brought up. A lot of people have been derisive, hostile, and sometimes sympathetic, thinking that I'm doing something unhealthy. The only answer that I have come up with is that people are acting out in defense. They don't want to deal with their own problems, so they find a way to avoid identifying them as problems. That answer doesn't seen complete though.
Any thoughts?
Ang
May 18, 2015
Replying to Joshua Myers
He pointed it out - it's social proof. Put another way, our reptilian brains are wired to think that the worst case scenario in life is to be a social outcast. This might have been true thousands of years ago from a physical survival perspective (higher chance of hunting and finding food if you're with others) and is probably still true now from an emotional perspective (Maslow's pyramid - love and belonging, just look at the stories of teen suicide as a result of alienation), but if you want to stand out from the crowd, you're going to have to dare to be different. Sometimes that's intellectually, sometimes that's financially.
Note that there's nothing wrong with being part of the crowd - for example, my friends and I happily consume copious amounts of alcohol when we are visiting Vegas even though we know that's bad for our health and our wallets, you just have to know what you want out of life and what makes you happy. Just because there is something to be said for the efficiency of saving and living a healthy life (and the nice thing is no matter what, you can always improve for the better), doesn't mean that it's the exact track that all humans want to take
Joshua Myers
May 18, 2015
Replying to Ang
I get that social proofing can create or modify perception and expectation. This is why people think that an obese person is healthy, or that living paycheck to paycheck is acceptable. They are surrounded by it all the time so it starts to make sense. What I don't understand is the hostility people have towards others who are making obviously good choices. I can't understand that solely through the mental model of social proof.
Adam
May 19, 2015
Replying to Joshua Myers
People don't like others around that make them feel bad about their own choices and exposure detrimental behavior.
A family of obese people with a bad diet and no exercise, may very well ostracize and shame the one person at the table in great shape, eating salads and hitting the gym because it shines a bright light on the poor choices that they rationalize away normally.
Ang
May 19, 2015
Replying to Joshua Myers
If you subscribe to Munger's mental models, a mix of inconsistency-avoidance, envy/jealousy, and social proof will explain what you are pondering:
http://fernbankpartners.com/files/mungermisjudgment.pdf
Steve
May 19, 2015
Replying to Joshua Myers
I think the only sane thing one can do is to - borrowing a Munger favourite - is to not give a damn what anyone else thinks about you. It's harder said than done, and it will alienate you from the herd by not taking part in the herd rituals (excessive drinking, tv, junk foods), but it's the only way to be (for me anyways).
Every break at work I sit at my desk and read. Coffee break? Coffee and read. Lunch break? Eat my lunch and read. Everyone else in the office piles into the lunch room to gossip or talk about the latest, dumbest tv shows they are watching. To me that's a total waste of time and I don't participate. I couldn't give a damn what they thought of me for not joining in.
Connelly Barnes
May 19, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
@joshuakennon:disqus:
That is interesting what you relate from your social circle and experiences. The vast majority of my social graph consists of people who are at a healthy weight. I didn't realize people consumed so many excess calories, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Note that I didn't make a specific claim other than provide a reference to a book that I found interesting. The book discusses a number of different studies of what happens when people are put on carb-rich diets, and/or low caloric diets -- they tend to become very lethargic, unless they are forced to exercise, and then they become both lethargic and constantly hungry, and have constantly spiking insulin levels. The point the book was making was that eating poor quality food could make one constantly crave food, feel hungry, and be low on energy, so that one would have to be a superstar of self-control to actually lose weight on the American Processed Corn Derivatives diet.
The book also had some interesting studies of Native Americans who were historically very fit until they were given white bread by the U.S. government. In more modern times, they had malnutrition, due to eating a lot of white bread. They would be very skinny (due to malnutrition) up until a certain age, where they would rapidly become obese (due to malnutrition). I found it interesting.
I am not an expert in nutrition although I have been learning from some family members who are pretty obsessed with nutrition and health. Given what I've read, my guess is that it is healthiest to eat around 2,000 calories per day from healthy, unprocessed whole foods, avoid most carbs, and get regular aerobic exercise. I hope that proscription cannot be twisted to cause unhealthiness :-).
If one did not want to limit calories at all, I suppose it would be pretty freaking hard to become obese by eating only non-starch veggies, as long as high protein veggies were limited. Interestingly, that idea was incorporated into the Weight Watchers diet which allows unlimited veggies. On a related topic, I suppose Weight Watchers common stock is worthless because their free cash flow will not be sufficient to repay their 2020 debt. It is unfortunate.
Connelly Barnes
June 28, 2015
Replying to Connelly Barnes
To add to this discussion, here are a couple articles discussing the effects of high-fructose corn syrup on lab rats and humans.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
http://drhyman.com/2011/05/13/5-reasons-high-fructose-corn-syrup-will-kill-you/
The first study by Princeton was highly criticized by the corn syrup industry. Gee, I wonder why.
Personally, I avoid eating processed foods such as corn derivatives.
Andrew Lynch
June 13, 2015
Replying to Joshua Kennon
The issue here is that saying "he is fat because he consumed more calories than he burnt", while true, isn't that useful. It's like saying "this business is going under because their costs are higher than their revenues". It's technically true, but the better question to ask is, WHY is it true? What is causing this person to eat more calories than they are burning? And often, in the case of obesity, it's because it's a hell of a lot easier to eat 2000 calories of cake than it is to eat 2000 calories of steak and salad.
Now, if you have someone who is eating paleo, just meat, animal fat and vegetables, and they're still putting on weight, then again, saying that they're eating more calories than they're burning is true, but doesn't address the issue. What exactly is it that is causing that? Are they over-exercising and consequently "reward-eating"? Are they cooking with way too much oil? Are they eating way too many nuts?
THOSE are the things that you should be looking for in tracking. If you're overweight you should absolutely track what you're eating, and the total number of calories, but then you need to make sure that you're drawing the right conclusions from the data too.
Zaphod
May 18, 2015
Replying to Connelly Barnes
While there is some merit to this argument...it receives far too much attention for precisely the reason this blog mentions, we want it to be true, while we gloss over the obvious truth that limiting calories is 99% of the battle. Yes, certain food stuffs digest/satiate/etc, better than others and even increase/decrease other behaviors...there is no denying basic math. If you consume less you lose weight period, its an inconvenient truth.
I was trying to shed some weight for an uphill bike race a few years back and although most people would have thought me already thin, the only thing I did was eat less calories as measured by an app. I do tend to eat well to start, but I didnt limit anything other than calories and lost weight accordingly.
Joshua Myers
May 19, 2015
You're probably right that it's a mix of mental models, and trying to place it in one box isn't good enough. The weird part though is that these actions are contradictory. If social proof convinces a person that obesity is normal and acceptable, then why are they jealous that that someone else is abnormal (in their eyes). If that's the case a lot of people are going through life with contradictory models in their heads. Maybe trying to look at the issue rationally isn't a real possibility.
IlovePi314159265359
May 21, 2015
This is something I try to do in my own life. It recently led to a large change, in that I have my spouse drive our vehicle. For a long time I insisted on driving, because I was positive that I was a better and safer driver. However, people who drove with me would regularly comment that I made them nervous. The more I examined this, the more understandable it was. I would regularly get distracted at low speeds and this led to somewhat erratic driving. My spouse doesn't care one way or the other, and simply wants to listen to music.
This whole process took a long time because the only data I have is anecdotal (no tickets, accidents, etc). Now that my spouse drives (for most local driving), we are safer, the spouse gets loads of music, and I have added probably a weeks worth of free time for reading books.
Thomas Mault
May 29, 2015
Sidenote: There's currently a campaign running on IndieGogo for a waterproof, 24/7 wearable that tracks heart rate [1]. Given the interesting link between cardiovascular disease and resting heart rate [2] this tech could be pretty useful for the process of changing behaviour in response to measured inputs.
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ampstrip-comfortable-24-7-heart-rate-wearable/x/10931889#/story
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109707018232
jhonsonally
June 1, 2015
‿(̶◉͛‿◉̶)‿ joshua is going back < www.Fox81.Com
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