Stephen Wolfram posted The Personal Analytics of My Life. He collected analyzed 20 years of data about his online life. He charted all the email messages he sent and received in 20 years including the time and recipients. He charted all his appointments, phone calls, and even all the keystrokes he typed in ten years and all the steps he took in the last two.
Nate Silver and Tim O'Reilly called it "amazing". Jamie Zawinski called it "EPIC".
I just don't get it. Sure the data collection is impressive and the charts are pretty, but as near as I can tell he learned nothing interesting (that is non-obvious) from the exercise.
"And for more than 20 years, I’ve been sending emails throughout my waking day, albeit with a little dip around dinner time. The big gap each day comes from when I was asleep. And for the last decade, the plot shows I’ve been pretty consistent, going to sleep around 3am ET, and getting up around 11am (yes, I’m something of a night owl)."
He looks at the time of his phone calls and finds a similar pattern. Shocking that he's on the phone and sending email when awake and not so much when he's asleep.
"Here’s another way to look at the data—this shows the probability for calls to start at a given time. There’s a curious pattern of peaks—near hours and half-hours. And of course those occur because many phone calls are scheduled at those times." Really? People don't often schedule phone calls to start at 17 minutes after the hour? I wouldn't call that "curious".
He pointed out trends that showed in the 90s he worked on his own on A New Kind of Science and in the 2000s he was involved in more company projects like Alpha. Even I knew that about him.
"The plot above suggests that there’s been a progressive increase in my email volume over the years." I'm pretty sure that everyone's email volume has increased over the years.
"There are all kinds of detailed facts to extract: like that the average fraction of keys I type that are backspaces has consistently been about 7% (I had no idea it was so high!)." I'm sure it shouldn't have taken him ten years of data to figure that out. I bet if he looked at each key typed, that E would be the most popular.
"The overall pattern is fairly clear. It’s meetings and collaborative work during the day, a dinner-time break, more meetings and collaborative work, and then in the later evening more work on my own. I have to say that looking at all this data I am struck by how shockingly regular many aspects of it are. But in general I am happy to see it. For my consistent experience has been that the more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things."
I guess. Am I missing something here?
P.S. I did miss the introduction of Wolfram Alpha Pro which lets you upload your own data. I'm sure some people will find that very useful.
1 comment:
Tedious and not terribly insightful. But, I found the same thing about A New Kind of Science. It was a good idea, but didn't add much to my thinking, and it took a long time to do it.
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