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Authors: Patrick Tucker
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these were highly rational human beings, top performers in their fields. The team projected they would have the task complete in two years, tops. Thing is, they knew statistically that 40 percent of similar teams had failed at similar tasks, and those that succeeded finished behind schedule. They couldnât convince themselves that thestatistics applied to them. Kahnemanâs team took six years and the curriculum was never adopted.
So the inside view is human nature, but you may say the same thing about overeating, oversleeping, and chronic masturbation. It should be possible, then, to avoid it. This is where self-tracking comes in. Michael J. Mauboussin, chief investment strategist for Legg Mason, has written about Kahnemanâs work and suggests that this is a simple matter of summoning the will to find the
right
reference class. In short: âAssess the distribution of outcomes. Once you have a reference class, take a close look at the rate of success and failure. Study the distribution, including the average outcome, the most common outcome, and check for extreme successes or failures.â 7
Without exactly understanding the concept of reference class, Franklin knew that the first step to discovering his own capacity for virtuous behavior was first to objectively record how often he fell short of his goal. He needed better and more regular data. He kept up the practice of virtue logging his entire life and seemed to derive great therapeutic benefit from it. But aside from a certain regularity of record keeping, his conclusions about which virtues he had flouted were entirely subjective and imprecise.
Self-tracking became much more of an actual science with the advent of electronic computation; the ability to input, store, and process lots of data. Though it sounds faddish, QS has been around nearly as long as the modern PC. The home computer allowed for better record keeping of more activity at much less cost of time and energy and also provided a much better analysis of those records. This is why the two most significant celebrity devotees of QS are also two of the worldâs more important modern figures in computer science.
The Rigorously Examined Lives of Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram
Hereâs what most people know about Ray Kurzweil: heâs a futurist and bestselling author who mainstreamed the concept of Singularityâafuture tipping point in which technological progress accelerates at an exponential rate, allowing humankind to devise a means to cure all death and illness and become virtually immortal. Some people also know that heâs a celebrated inventor, having created the worldâs first charge-coupled flatbed scanner, a brand of electric keyboards that bears his name, a device that can read text in books aloud for the blind, and a number of other programs and gadgets.
Hereâs what very few people know about one of the most important minds in AI: though heâs sometimes accused of being a robot himself, heâs actually very funny. Itâs a bone-dry, snap-quick, intensely human humor that doesnât at all resemble an AI entity. Few people also know that his father, a composer, died of heart disease at a relatively young age and passed his genetic predisposition for elevated cholesterol down to his son.
Kurzweil was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the mid-1980s. The insulin treatment his doctor put him on made him a good deal fatter but no healthier. It seemed his congenital heart condition and treatment were locked in a race to kill him. So he decided to treat himself. Doing so meant constantly researching new ways to improve his health and carefully logging dozens of different biological reactions to drugs, diet, sleep, and exercise.
In 1999 he met his current physician and sometime collaborator Terry Grossman, on whom he made an immediate impression, as Grossman recounted for the
Futurist
magazine.
âI am not surprised when patients come to see
So the inside view is human nature, but you may say the same thing about overeating, oversleeping, and chronic masturbation. It should be possible, then, to avoid it. This is where self-tracking comes in. Michael J. Mauboussin, chief investment strategist for Legg Mason, has written about Kahnemanâs work and suggests that this is a simple matter of summoning the will to find the
right
reference class. In short: âAssess the distribution of outcomes. Once you have a reference class, take a close look at the rate of success and failure. Study the distribution, including the average outcome, the most common outcome, and check for extreme successes or failures.â 7
Without exactly understanding the concept of reference class, Franklin knew that the first step to discovering his own capacity for virtuous behavior was first to objectively record how often he fell short of his goal. He needed better and more regular data. He kept up the practice of virtue logging his entire life and seemed to derive great therapeutic benefit from it. But aside from a certain regularity of record keeping, his conclusions about which virtues he had flouted were entirely subjective and imprecise.
Self-tracking became much more of an actual science with the advent of electronic computation; the ability to input, store, and process lots of data. Though it sounds faddish, QS has been around nearly as long as the modern PC. The home computer allowed for better record keeping of more activity at much less cost of time and energy and also provided a much better analysis of those records. This is why the two most significant celebrity devotees of QS are also two of the worldâs more important modern figures in computer science.
The Rigorously Examined Lives of Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram
Hereâs what most people know about Ray Kurzweil: heâs a futurist and bestselling author who mainstreamed the concept of Singularityâafuture tipping point in which technological progress accelerates at an exponential rate, allowing humankind to devise a means to cure all death and illness and become virtually immortal. Some people also know that heâs a celebrated inventor, having created the worldâs first charge-coupled flatbed scanner, a brand of electric keyboards that bears his name, a device that can read text in books aloud for the blind, and a number of other programs and gadgets.
Hereâs what very few people know about one of the most important minds in AI: though heâs sometimes accused of being a robot himself, heâs actually very funny. Itâs a bone-dry, snap-quick, intensely human humor that doesnât at all resemble an AI entity. Few people also know that his father, a composer, died of heart disease at a relatively young age and passed his genetic predisposition for elevated cholesterol down to his son.
Kurzweil was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in the mid-1980s. The insulin treatment his doctor put him on made him a good deal fatter but no healthier. It seemed his congenital heart condition and treatment were locked in a race to kill him. So he decided to treat himself. Doing so meant constantly researching new ways to improve his health and carefully logging dozens of different biological reactions to drugs, diet, sleep, and exercise.
In 1999 he met his current physician and sometime collaborator Terry Grossman, on whom he made an immediate impression, as Grossman recounted for the
Futurist
magazine.
âI am not surprised when patients come to see
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