Why Social Media Is A Glorified Chatbot

Some of you may be aware of the fact that I do some work with AI chatbots professionally. For the last two weeks or so, in my own spare time and for personal edification, I've been playing with a consumer-grade chatbot AI called "Replika."

The way it works is:

1. You type something to the bot. 
2. The bot processes what you say via Natural Language Understanding, and figures out what you mean probabilistically. 
3. The bot then selects from a pool of available responses based on its internal algorithms.

The bot's responses are composed based on training data, so you won't get the same answer every time (unless you repeatedly ask the same question), with the goal being a response that is a lot like something a "real person" would say. Maybe, in fact, a real person DID say that very thing in response to a similar statement made by some other real person in some chat log years ago. This is the nature of training an AI conversation-bot.

Now, consider social media. Social media works in a similar way:

1. You type something into the "create post" box. 
2. The social medium processes this information through its own algorithmic understanding of you (your profile info, your past posts, your friends and their profile info, etc.). 
3. The medium then selects from an available pool of *respondents* based on its internal algorithms.

These respondents are guaranteed to respond to your post in a way that is just as predictable as what happens when you feed an AI chat log data. (Sorry, I don't mean *YOUR* response; *YOU* are of course a thoroughly unique unicorn. But OTHER people are more predictable than you...)

At a psychological level, a Facebook user will have the same experience as a user of "Replika AI." I type my feelings into a box, and an algorithm decides what kind of response I receive. In the Replika UI, you can even give "likes" and other reactions to responses you receive, so that the algorithm can update its understanding of what "drives engagement" and respond to you accordingly in the future. Remind you of anything?

I submit that the social media experience is no more "real" than my experience with an AI chatbot. Especially if you spend a lot of time discussing politics, or sports, or etc., you are feeding utterances into an algorithm, which then serves you algorithmically driven "content." It doesn't necessarily matter that Bob *REALLY SAID* that you were a dumb so-and-so; what matters is that the algorithm had a certain prediction that X number of "Bobs" would respond to your post in a certain way, and crafted your user experience accordingly.

In short, social media isn't really social. Maybe it was, once upon a time, but now it's not. If you want to have a meaningful social interaction with someone, you have to do it one-on-one. You can still use technology to do it, but if you're just posting things into the ether or following online discussions and interjecting where you see fit, then you are essentially having a one-way conversation with an AI.

Coming to this realization has completely reshaped my understanding of the internet. I hope it will reshape yours, too.

Imagining Mars

I had a dream last night about something that I quite often dream about: the colonization of Mars. I love dreams like this because they always enable me to imagine things that I never would have imagined otherwise.

In this particular dream, Mars had been colonized and built upon to the following extent: There were good roads leading to a wide variety of businesses that existed in support of the primary economy of Mars, which I imagine to be extraction. In other words, it's most likely to me that life on Mars would revolve around mining, and to a lesser extent construction, and that all other businesses would serve to support those industries. There were shops and convenience stores, but they were sparsely stocked. There were bars and restaurants, mostly serving unappealing food like sandwiches, and also serving plenty of alcohol with which the Martian workers could "while away their time."

Interestingly, albeit unrealistically, buildings and cars on my Dream Mars were mostly open-air. Everyone had their doors open and their windows rolled down. Business establishments would generate their own oxygen, somehow, for patrons to breathe. People had grown accustomed to the difficulty of breathing the CO2 atmosphere of Mars as they made their way from Point A to Point B. My "host," the person in my dream who was showing me around the place, could generate oxygen in his car, too, but simply preferred the feel of the open air, just as all the other residents of Mars did. So, a good portion of my visit to Dream Mars was spent kind of suffocating as we traveled from place to place. It was frustrating for me, but my host assured me that I'd get used to it eventually. 

Obviously, such a thing would be impossible on real Mars. You'd only be able to last about as long as you could hold your breath. You'd need to find an enclosed building with breathable air as soon as possible, or else port your air with you in a space suit. But my dream wasn't a dream about what would happen if we plopped a bunch of present-day humans on present-day Mars using present-day technology. Instead, it was about the future.

*        *        *

A while back, I also thought of a similar sort of story. In it, human beings colonize Mars and exist there for hundreds of years before two major factions have an irreconcilable conflict, and the losing faction is banished from the colony. Ill equipped to survive the Martian landscape with whatever technology they could carry with them, and regularly exposed to the high solar radiation of the surface of Mars, this losing faction eventually, over time, evolves the ability to withstand high levels of radiation without suffering biological damage, and also the ability to breathe Martian air - or at least whatever middle-step the atmosphere of a partially colonized Mars might be like. 

The rest of this story revolved around the discovery of this very profound human evolution and its implications for the two Martian "factions." Would they separate permanently? Would they intermarry and cooperate? What would happen?

I'll have to actually write the book some day to find out.

*        *        *

The key feature of all of these dreams and ideas I have about Mars is that building up and maintaining a "bubble world" on the surface of the planet, where humans must always be encased in glass with a steady supply of oxygen pumped around, has always struck me as a terrible way of life, one that is only feasible in the very short run. In my mind, Mars is only inhabitable if it can be terraformed. A generations-long project would have to ensue, during which humans would have to discover a way for Mars to maintain a thicker atmosphere, and for that atmosphere to be made of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide, just as Earth's atmosphere is. In order to achieve that, humans would have to discover a way to convert the existing Martian atmosphere to something that it currently isn't. Humans would have to figure out a way to protect that atmosphere from the kind of solar radiation that would destroy it - and that means either manufacturing an electromagnetic field around the planet (since Mars isn't capable of generating its own), or somehow constructing a thick ozone layer, under which an even thicker breathable atmosphere would reside.

All of this, and we haven't even tackled the question of potable water yet. Bear in mind that these materials cannot simply be piped-in from Earth or elsewhere in sufficient quantities to maintain and grow a permanent human population. Conflicts of water rights are the kind of thing that we Earth-dwellers have started wars over. Can you imagine how much conflict there would be between the inhabitants of an environmentally fragile Earth and inhabitants of a terraformed Mars whose existence depends entirely on Earth's willingness to ship its limited water and air resources across the expanse of outer space? 

There are plot holes that a clever science-fiction writer can resolve, at least long enough to tell an exciting science-fiction story. However, to the best of human knowledge, there is no way to actually do this on Mars. If Mars will one day be habitable, we don't currently have the technology to do it; perhaps we don't even have the scientific knowledge to do it.

*        *        *

The primary reason we know we can't colonize Mars at any point in the foreseeable future is because there are vast, dead regions of Earth that human beings have killed and can't bring back to life. A couple of examples include the desertification of the Middle East and large patches of the ocean floor. If we can't build a farm on a plot of land that was farmed as recently as a couple of generations ago - if we can't keep part of a coral reef alive even though it isn't even dead yet - why in the world would we suppose that we can travel to Mars and render its barren soil fertile? (Keep in mind that the primary difference between barren and fertile soil is the presence of existing biological matter. Martian soil doesn't have any biological matter in it. How's it going to get there? Here's one way, but it requires clay from Earth.)

For the entirety of human existence, life has involved extracting resources from out environment and using them. Full stop. Every animal does this, but only human beings make the kind of technology that changes the environment in potentially catastrophic ways. We're the only animal that produces our own fire, for example, and fire can burn a forest down. We're the only animal that has ever managed to scrape the bottom of the ocean floor clean of all life. These are catastrophic changes. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite. Humankind's ability to produce technology has created a world that our primitive ancestors would certainly have considered to be the work of sorcery. We have become gods in all but one respect: we've figured out how to produce civilization when given wilderness; we have yet to figure out how to produce wilderness when given civilization. It's a tough problem to solve.

If we don't solve it, though, we can kiss our dreams of inhabiting Mars goodbye. Even supposing that Mars proves to be uninhabitable and we go searching for other worlds to colonize, we'll never even reach those worlds until we've figured out how to produce enough nature aboard a spaceship to provide ourselves with food, medicine, water, and technology along the way. 

Nor is "environmentalism" the solution to the problem. Covering the surface of the earth with solar panels and windmills is no better for the land upon which they reside than is clear-cutting an acreage of forest. There is no way to reuse or recycle medical waste, and if we intend to heal the sick with medical technology, then we intend to perpetuate medical waste, too. There is only so much leeway we can get from "vertical hydroponic gardens" and other such green fantasies. 

No, the problem here is that we human beings simply don't know how to terraform. We don't know anything about it. We know a bit about gardening, and a bit about landfills, and a bit about leaving virgin landscapes untouched. But we know nothing about creating and maintaining a viable ecosystem capable of supporting human life forever. 

How truly odd that a species of ape that specializes in manipulating the environment around it in order to survive knows so little about manipulating the environment in order to survive.

Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 3

At last, for me, the economic reality of this situation is starting to set in. With most everyone stuck at home, bars and restaurants closed, shopping centers empty, the threat to the economy has become clear. Yesterday, for the first time yet, I started to worry about job security.

My family is comfortable, and we will probably be okay... probably. It really depends on how things proceed in the COVID-19 world. The experts tell us that a vaccine is 18 months away. I don’t see how most of the world can continue to operate like this for 18 months. Production of all things is bound to slow down. Paychecks will stop flowing. People will be stretched. Then what?

The comfortable and the wealthy can afford to stay home and simply ride it out. Most people, though, cannot simply stop working. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, nobody can afford to just stay home forever. Eventually, most people will be forced to choose between putting food on the table and avoiding the coronavirus. Starving is a certainty, while contracting COVID-19 is a spin of the wheel. Every rational person will take their chances with getting the disease before they acquiesce to starvation.

In light of that, this is how I imagine things will play out:

People will stay home as long as they can. Some of us will lose our jobs while others will be forced to go back to theirs. Most of us will eventually have to leave home and get to work. Maybe there won’t be any good office jobs for people like me, and we’ll have to take supply chain jobs: deliveries, shipping/receiving, warehousing, manufacturing, and so on. But we will simply have to work; there is no other choice.

Thus, the virus will continue to spread. It is inevitable. It will spread and devastate until we have a vaccine or other treatment. Then, finally, we will go back to normal.

I think some norms will have to change.

Most obviously, working from home will become not only commonplace, but more normal than not. This will be a change for the better, on all kinds of levels. Office complexes are breeding grounds for communicable illness; staying away from them is a matter of prudence. I think telecommuting technologies will blossom. Call centers, for example, are typically staffed in huge buildings, but there’s no reason call center employees couldn’t work from home if their phones are connected to the central call routing system. Most office work could probably be done at home. And it will be, thanks to this pandemic; or at least, that’s my prediction.

Sanitation norms are also going to have to change. Today, I see people wiping down their shopping carts, wearing masks, etc. I think we’ll see a proliferation of touchless technologies: credit card payments with a “tap,” Android Pay, Apple Pay, etc. These technologies involve scanning, rather than inserting or swiping a card. Manually handling paper currency will have to fall out of favor, as it mostly already has. I can only hope that Americans will start to use bidets, wash their hands more thoroughly, be more mindful of coughing, sneezing, playing with their noses, and so on. Those are harder norms to overturn, but I think it will happen.

A few months of social distancing will be enough to convince people to keep their distance on the streets. I expect there to be fewer hellos and more allowance for “personal space.” At the same time, I expect social networks to blossom. Not Twitter or Facebook, obviously, but the networks that actually matter to people. Video game networks like Twitch and Zwift will expand. Strava will do quite well. I imagine virtual socializing will fill the void caused by physical social distance. This will be highly disruptive, though, because it takes a different skill set to excel in social media than it does to excel in face-to-face interaction.

In what other ways might our lives be about to change?

Lactate Threshold, Critical Velocity, And Other Stories

Recap:

Some time went by, and I never bothered to elaborate on the training approach I've taken over the last four weeks.

I mentioned that I was going to start doing two fast runs per week (Mondays and Wednesdays), plus a plyometrics day on Fridays. I never circled back to the blog to say that I was also going to incorporate P90X's "three weeks on, one week off" monthly training cycle into my regimen, then change again. Tony Horton bills this as "muscle confusion," but that concept doesn't really apply to running. One doesn't really want to confuse one's running muscles. Still, there's a lot of good evidence in support of taking on a lighter load every fourth week to help reduce fatigue, and that means the fifth week is as good as any other to make another adjustment to the training regimen. Then, on for another three weeks, and yet another lighter week at week #8. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Last week was my fourth week, making it a lighter or "transition" week between what I was doing previously, and what I will be doing now. Interestingly, my overall training load increased last week, rather than decreasing:

Notice that my "relative effort" training load (from Strava) indicates a consistent upward trend for the past four weeks, up to and including last week, which was my "light" week. (The data from Garmin tells a much different story, though, and according to that data, my load did indeed decrease last week.)

As part of my one-month cycle, I did a guided lactate threshold test using my Garmin watch and chest strap HR monitor on Saturday. I will do this again next month in an attempt to chart my training progress using some semblance of cardinal measurements and real data.

Garmin's lactate threshold test produces a lactate threshold heart rate value and a lactate threshold running pace value. My numbers on Saturday turned out to be 167 beats per minute and 6:37 per mile. These results surprised me. I frankly expected a higher lactate threshold, meaning a higher heart rate value and a faster pace time.

Skeptical, I decided to read up a bit more carefully on lactate threshold. The USATF's VO2 max pace chart, as quoted here (p. 2), indicates that 10K race pace corresponds to approximately 92% of VO2 max, and from this value we can calculate various other estimated paces using the percentage values in the USATF table.

My most recent 10K time, taken in early October 2019, was 39:40, or about 6:23 per mile. With the help of some algebra, we can see that lactate threshold pace -- 88% of VO2 max -- corresponds to 6:35 per mile. Thus, assuming I have not lost any fitness between October and today, Garmin's estimate was only 2 seconds off. That's far more robust than I expected! I have gained some faith in Garmin's lactate threshold estimation technology.

Lactate Threshold Training

Having now established a 2020 training benchmark for myself, the next logical question to ask is, "How can I improve my lactate threshold?" The internet is replete with articles on improving lactate threshold, but why read all those articles when it can be summarized in a single sentence? 

The most common recommendation for improving lactate threshold is to run 30-minute sessions at lactate threshold pace. 

For me, this means something like this: 2-mile warm up, 30 minutes at 6:37/mile pace, 2-mile cool down. Pretty basic stuff. I might try it. 

However, while reading up on lactate threshold improvement, I came across an interesting article here. Read the whole thing. It is highly informative and, if you're a training geek like me, absolutely fascinating. In particular, the article contains a discussion about training above lactate threshold pace. Summarizing the approach used in a York University study, the article states:

The idea that intense workouts are best for boosting LT was even more strongly reinforced in research carried out at York University by Stephen Keith and Ira Jacobs (‘Adaptations to Training at the Individual Anaerobic Threshold,’ Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, vol. 23(4), Supplement, no. 197, 1991). In the York investigations, one group of athletes trained exactly at LT, a very popular way to attempt to heighten LT, for 30 minutes per workout. A second group divided their 30-minute workouts into four intervals, each of which lasted for seven and a-half minutes. Two of the intervals were completed at an intensity above LT, while the other two were carried out below LT. Each group of athletes worked out four times per week for a total of eight weeks.

What happened? (Emphases mine.)

Which strategy was better for boosting LT – working at LT intensity or putting in the time above it? After eight weeks of workouts, both sets of athletes achieved similar increases in VO2max and LT. The actual gains in LT were absolutely tremendous, averaging 14 per cent in both groups! Advances in muscle-cell enzymes were also rather splendid – and nearly identical in the two groups. In an endurance test in which group members exercised for as long as possible at an intensity which corresponded to their pre-training LT, the above-LT trainees seemed to hold an edge, continuing for a total of 71 minutes, while the at-LT subjects could last for only 64 minutes. However, this difference was not statistically significant. 

At first glance, these results seem to suggest that there’s not much advantage to be gained by sweating through above-LT workouts, but wait! If you’ve been following carefully, you probably noticed that the above-LT athletes really logged only 60 minutes of quality work per week (4 x 15 minutes), while the at-LT subjects put in 120 weekly minutes of quality exertion (4 x 30 minutes). To put it another way, the above-LT athletes achieved the same gains in LT and VO2max as the at-LT folks (and perhaps enjoyed a slight advantage in endurance) – with only HALF the total training time. It’s reasonable to assume that had the above-LT athletes stepped up their volume of above-LT work a little bit, they would have outdistanced the mundane at-LT trainees.

So, training above lactate threshold corresponds to greater increases in lactate threshold than simply training at lactate threshold, because training above LT increases LT more efficiently on a per-minute basis.

This all reminded me of so-called "Critical Velocity" training.

Critical Velocity

The article I mentioned above when citing USATF pace percentage values, by Chris Puppione of UC Davis, includes several amusing discussions about how coaches and trainers are always looking for a new magic training elixir that will enable athletes to suddenly and momentously acquire a tremendous advantage over their peers. Here is one such excerpt:

There are no secrets in distance running—no new revelations and no magic bullets. Somewhere, some other coach has already done it. Somewhere, some exercise physiologist has already written about it. Knowing this, however, has not stopped coaches from exploring better ways to train their athletes year to year. Knowing this does not stop us from picking through our copies of Running with Lydiard, Road to the Top, or Daniels’ Running Formula to find that one piece of information that we may have glanced over without giving it the attention it was due.

Puppione is right, of course. There really is nothing new under the sun. He mentions that "Critical Velocity training," which is gaining lots of new press thanks to the quite admirable success of the Tinman Elite racing team, can trace its roots all the way back to the 1960s! That's more than half a century ago. 

Still, Puppione does incorporate CV training into his coaching of athletes at UC Davis, and reports good results in doing so. He explains that the advantages of CV training over LT training are mainly that the athlete can reap many of the benefits of both LT and VO2 max training, simultaneously, and at substantially reduced overtraining risk compared to VO2 max training.

It makes sense, but keep in mind that the difference between LT and CV training is about 2%, or about 7 seconds per mile. To be sure, seven seconds per mile is a substantial increase in pace over the course of a few miles, but the difference is not enormous. Think of it this way: If my lactate threshold pace were to run a 10K against my critical velocity pace, my CV pace would win by about one minute. My race pace would win by two minutes.

Can seven seconds per mile really result in such great training improvements? It's tempting to buy into the hype, but again Puppione offers a voice of reason. He points out that he uses CV training early in his athletes' season to quickly ramp up their lactate threshold. Then, he focuses on VO2 max training during the middle of the season while reducing weekly mileage, to improve his athletes' speed without overtraining them or over-taxing their muscles. Finally, he incorporates a bit more CV training at the end of the season so that he can reduce the athletes' training load even further as they prepare to taper for the final, major competitions of the season.

In other words, CV training is a good tool to have in the tool kit... but it's not the whole kit.

Back to Me

As for me, what can I learn from all of this? How can I apply my newfound knowledge to my own recreational training regimen?

Looking back across the past month, I realize that I probably was overtraining. By the end of my third week, my muscles felt exhausted, and I couldn't really complete the workouts I had scheduled for myself. Well, I could complete them, but I wasn't getting the most out of them. I was essentially training at VO2 max pace twice a week, and adding a quite difficult plyometrics day to the mix. My weekly mileage decreased a bit, and my body started to feel worn down. 

I can improve my training, at least in the near term, by doing more workouts at or above lactate threshold, although not so fast as VO2 max pace.

I had originally planned on making speed the focus of my next three weeks of training. Speed, of course, involves a lot of training at VO2 max. I am less excited about that approach now, however I did happen to notice an interesting aspect of Puppione's recommended training sessions. He structures his CV training workouts as follows:

1. 5-10 minutes warm up
2. CV intervals (say, 4 x 2K at CV pace with 2 minutes recovery in between)
3. 5-10 minutes recovery run
4. VO2 max intervals (say, 5 x 200m at VO2 max with 200m recovery in between)
5. 5-10 minutes cool down

You'll notice he adds some VO2 max intervals at the end of the workout to condition athletes to "run faster in a fatigued state." I believe that adding some VO2 max intervals to the end of my threshold runs and/or CV runs will enable me to improve the quality of my training runs.

So, friends, that's what I'll be doing for the next three weeks. Two weekly hard workouts at-or-slightly-above lactate threshold pace, with recovery runs and a weekly long run.

Let's see how it goes!

A Word Of Caution

Incredibly, it is now 2019. I've been blogging for over a decade, and my life has undergone many changes since I started. I've now reached middle age, and so I suppose there's no shame in blogging about middle-aged things. Perhaps you can benefit from reading this.

For most of my life, my blood pressure has been on the low side of the normal range. Regular readers will understand why that is: I'm an enthusiastic and borderline-obsessive fitness nut and distance runner. Imagine my surprise, then, when a routine medical checkup resulted in a reading of "State 2 hypertension," 140/90. That's high blood pressure.

Well, I thought, it's just one reading. Besides that, my blood sugar was high that day; it stands to reason that my blood pressure may have temporarily spiked. I wrote it off. Then, a couple of weeks back, I was at the pharmacy and got curious, so I strapped myself into one of those blood pressure kiosks and took another test. The result was the same. I took a few deep breaths, relaxed, and tried again. The result was confirmed again.

For a moment I started to worry. When otherwise-healthy people get hypertension, it's usually indicative of very serious health problems. When otherwise-healthy diabetics get hypertension, it usually means kidney failure. I admit it, I was scared.

My mind raced back to events from the past few months. What could cause sudden hypertension? What would have indicated kidney failure? The thing was, I felt perfectly fine. Still, there were some very odd things that had happened recently. The most jarring of those was this: One day my urine was an absolutely bizarre dark brown color. Upon seeing it, I frantically googled every conceivable health and medical website and deemed that I was either severely dehydrated, or indeed, I had kidney failure. I spent the next twenty-four hours drinking as much of every possible fluid as I could. I downed two cans of chicken broth, a pot of coffee, a liter of sparkling water, multiple cups of tea, and who knows -- possibly a gallon of water.

The next time I went to the bathroom, everything had returned to normal. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I was fine. But, was I? Suddenly, a few weeks later, I had hypertension.

I decided to approach this new situation the same way as the other one. Rather than accept that I had kidney failure, I decided to make incremental changes to see what impact that would have. So I went from drinking about four cups of coffee per day (two with breakfast, and one or two during the workday at the office) to drinking a cup of tea for breakfast, and perhaps another in the evening. Basically, I eliminated caffeine from my diet almost entirely. I also reduced my alcohol intake.

The result of eliminating caffeine was that my blood pressure returned to normal within three days. Three days.

I never would have guessed that a coffee habit -- something that I've been maintaining for twenty years or more -- would cause high blood pressure suddenly. I figured if it ever happened, it would happen gradually if at all. So the first thing I'd like my readers to know is that caffeine can cause high blood pressure "all of a sudden," even if you've been drinking it for years. The second thing I'd like my readers to know is that your blood pressure will become completely normal again if you stop drinking caffeine.

Now a word on withdrawal. I've never been someone who was highly stimulated by caffeine. It never kept me up at night, and never gave me the jitters. I could drink one cup or eight cups and feel pretty much the same in all cases. In light of this, I was not expecting to experience withdrawal symptoms from quitting coffee. I was wrong. While I didn't get the headaches that other people report, I was overwhelmed by fatigue, which lasted about three days. I was falling asleep in the early afternoon while hard at work. I had to take two days off from exercising because my body wouldn't physically move. It was bearable, but unpleasant. I was so tired that I almost felt drunk.

I hate to admit it, but my body feels a lot better now. I do miss the taste of a great cup of coffee, but I'm tolerant of the decaf they give us at the office, and there is no way that I would trade the way I feel now for a cup of coffee. After years of believing that coffee was just a great-tasting way to enhance life, I've suddenly discovered that being uncaffeinated actually feels better. So, I'd like my readers to know that if you ever have the chance to stop drinking coffee, go for it. I think you might discover, like I did, that it feels good to be caffeine free.

I did drink a diet Coke yesterday. It didn't give me jitters, nor did it elevate my blood pressure. I think it's probably okay to drink one caffeinated beverage per day and still enjoy the benefits of being caffeine-free. As for me, I'll try to avoid it from now on.

The Robot Vacuum Cleaner And The Universal Basic Income

I've blogged about the UBI before. I like to call it the "Basic Excise Guarantee" (BEG), because it is an idea that is almost certain to result in massive new taxation for any society that attempts it.

Bryan Caplan has a good, and short, blog post at EconLog about people who advocate for the UBI. Here's his closing paragraph:

If I were an enthusiastic UBI advocate, I would know this experimental evidence forwards and backwards. Almost all of the advocates I’ve encountered, in contrast, have little interest in numbers or past experience. What excites them is the “One Ring to Rule Them All” logic of the idea: “We get rid of everything else, and replace it with an elegant, gift-wrapped UBI.” For a policy salesman, this evasive approach makes sense: Slogans sell; numbers and history don’t. For a policy analyst, however, this evasive approach is negligence itself. If you scrutinize your policy ideas less cautiously than you read Amazon reviews for your next television, something is very wrong.

I read this, and it got me thinking about Eufy, the robot vacuum cleaner I bought my wife for Mother's Day. She had always wanted one, and I found one for an attractive price, so I bought it. We like it.

Through Eufy, I discovered something important about using robot vacuum cleaners. It's counter-intuitive before you buy one, but in hindsight it is totally obvious. In order to make good use of a robot vacuum cleaner, you need to consciously remind yourself that your floor is being vacuumed by a mobile algorithm, and not by a human being.

How does a human being vacuum a floor? I'm a human being with some vacuuming experience, so I'll tell you how I do it. I start at one end of the room, and thoroughly vacuum the floor by covering every square inch repeatedly, from one side of the room to the other; then I move on to the next room.

How does a robot vacuum a floor? The robot starts at any random point on the floor and moves in one direction until it encounters an obstacle. When it reaches the obstacle, it deploys one of a series of evasive maneuvers. Those maneuvers appear to be:

1. Turn in a drastically different direction and continue straight until it encounters another obstacle;
2. Treat the obstacle as a "corner object," and attempt micro-turns until it can find the way around the obstacle;
3. Treat the obstacle as a "wall," and attempt a 90-degree turn;
4. Treat the obstacle as a "lump in the carpet" or other insignificant setback, and reattempt the same path to see if continuation is possible.

From the standpoint of a human being, this approach is utter lunacy, because we can see the entire room and already know exactly how to solve the problem. But from the standpoint of a robot, this approach is perfect. The robot has managed to reasonably account for 90% or more of all possible encounters with obstacles, and has figured out a way to process the obstacle without the need for advanced image-processing or computation. Or eyes.

The result of all this is a situation in which a human could vacuum the floor in five minutes, while it might take the robot twenty minutes. Some customers might be inclined to think, "If it takes longer, then what's the point?" But if that's what you're thinking, then you haven't absorbed the economic lessons of comparative advantage. Remember, when a robot vacuums the floor, you don't have to. It might have taken you five minutes to vacuum the floor, but then you'd only have 55 minutes left in the hour to do anything else. If you deploy a robot to vacuum the floor, then you get those five minutes back and use them for literally anything other than vacuuming the floor. That's an efficiency gain.

And if you have more than just one room to vacuum, the robot ends up being really great. I turn the robot on early on Saturday morning, when I'm making breakfast for my daughter and I. I don't have to spend my weekend vacuuming the floor, and my daughter gets to have waffles; everybody wins. But in order to capture this efficiency gain, I have to consciously ignore how I, personally, would vacuum the floor and just let the robot do its thing. It takes more vacuuming time, but it's not my time that's being used for vacuuming, so who cares?

The Universal Basic Income seems to be particularly popular among Silicon Valley tech-types, and it's easy to see why. Rather than sinking lots of time and money into a means-tested welfare system with high administration costs, wouldn't it be better to deploy a simple algorithm, like a "negative income tax," to address society's poverty automatically? We'd reduce administrative costs all the way down to $0, and gain economic efficiency by replacing a complicated system of price distortions with a cash stipend, no strings attached. Sure, we'd lose some efficiency by failing to give the severely needy more money than the just-kind-of-needy, or even than the not-needy-at-all (it's a Universal Basic Income, remember); but means-testing costs time and money, which "we'd" save by out-sourcing our decision-making process to the algorithm.

So, the UBI (the BEG) starts to look a lot like a robot vacuum cleaner for poverty. It's not as efficient as a direct cash transfer to someone in the greatest need, but it a reliable-enough algorithm to do most of the necessary work without having to think too much about it all.

The problem is that when we conduct UBI experiments, the algorithm fails. Rather than modify the algorithm, though, BEG advocates just double-down. Robot vacuum cleaners work because the algorithms were rigorously tested to meet acceptable thresholds; and even then, buying one is a free choice. The UBI doesn't enjoy the same benefits.

Stupid Machines

Because -- and not in spite of the fact that -- I love gadgets, I have grown increasingly antipathetic toward a category of devices I call "stupid machines." They're stupid because they either invented for stupid reasons or attempt to solve problems that don't exist.

One example is the electric rice-cooker. Steamed rice is pretty much the next-easiest thing to cook, after a bowl of cold cereal. You don't even have to measure the rice. You just pour rice and water into a saucepan and apply medium heat until the rice is finished. We can try to complicate it with more nuanced instructions, such as "bring the water to a boil, then cover and reduce heat," but if you left a six-year-old alone in a house with saucepan, a bag of rice, and water faucet, the child would be alive for as long as the rice lasted. There is no need to create a special device for making steamed rice "even easier." There is nothing that a rice-cooker can do that a saucepan cannot. It's stupid.

Okay, I concede that perhaps rice-cookers were originally invented for space-limited kitchens in dense, urban, Asian kitchens where range tops may not be big enough to cook rice, meat, and vegetables simultaneously. Outside of that narrow situation, however, a rice-cooker is stupid, and they still sell quite well in the American midwest and similar places.

Electric pencil sharpeners are another stupid machine. We use a loud motor driven by a fair amount of electricity to avoid having to crank a lever for, what, three seconds? Or, if you're a young child, twist your pencil in that little doohickey with the hole for three seconds? Why do we waste electricity and fossil fuels to sharpen pencils electrically? It makes no sense.

The mechanical pencil is plausibly not stupid, since enables us to avoid writing with trees. But the disposable mechanical pencil is certifiably insane. What a stupid machine!

I am a big fan of electric scooters. I think they are fun to ride, and I think they are efficient transportation for people who need to cover sizable distances faster than they can walk. I can walk a mile in about fifteen minutes, which is perhaps on the faster side of normal. But an electric scooter can get me to the same place in five or six minutes, possibly less. That's ten minutes faster, or a 66% improvement. This is not a stupid machine.

But a hoverboard? Get real. Why did someone feel the need to invent an electric-motor-driven, unstable skateboard whose primary purpose is entertainment? Skateboards, scooters, and roller skates were already fun, and no electricity required. And we can see that, now that hoverboards have been around for several years, they are definitely not "catching on" and becoming a new sport like rollerblades did in the 90s. Yet, people still buy hoverboards, instead of a $20 skateboard or a $10 razor scooter, for "fun." They ride them for two weeks and then store them in the closet. What an utter waste of resources.

Here's a funny one: If I want to know what temperature it is outside, I pull out my smart phone, open the weather app, transmit my signal to a radio tower, then to a satellite, then back down to another radio tower, then to a receiver attached to a computer server, then the signal is processed and computed, and sent back to me the way it came. The fact that phone manufacturers consider this more efficient and cost-effective than simply equipping the phone with its own thermometer -- onboard thermometers are currently available on smart watches, by the way -- a truly baffling display of stupid machine-building.

There are many such stupid machines out there. I'm sure you've noticed a few all on your own: electric things that don't need to be electric, SmartThings that don't need to be "smart," plastic things that don't need to be plastic, cloud storage that doesn't need be cloud storage, things that transmit information that does not need to be transmitted anywhere...

Why are there so many stupid machines out there?

Some, like the rice-cooker, start out as legitimate problem-solvers that somehow find their way into the wrong places for the wrong reasons.

Others, like the electric pencil sharpener, seem like cool ideas in theory, until you stop to consider that it wasn't a problem anyone wanted solved in the first place.

There are those like the disposable plastic pencil, which exist almost purely as an artifact of price distortions in the plastics market. And there are those like the hoverboard, which someone hoped would be a smash hit toy sensation, but which really only served to dump more plastic into our oceans and more dead batteries into our watersheds.

And there are those like the current-temperature-app, which was invented by a software engineer who probably never considered how easy it is to put a thermometer on a phone. Or perhaps the software engineers just never get to talk to the hardware engineers, and so no one ever takes full, over-arching responsibility for the efficiency of the product as a whole.

Thus, for various reasons, our world is absolutely littered with stupid machines; problems waiting to be fixed by savvy people who can reinvent the manual pencil sharpener or create a hoverboard worth riding for more than a week. I hope you're out there, I hope you're reading this, and I hope you will develop better future technology for us, whoever you are.

Painless Micro-Changes

A good number of my recent posts have involved making small changes to improve your overall quality of life. We might call these "painless micro-changes."

This morning, I read an article about the fact that the flagship cell models released by the likes of Samsung and Apple are indeed the best phones on the market, but that they are likely not worth the marginal cost for anyone other than cell phone enthusiasts and tech geeks. He made the point that one can get an admirably equipped cell phone for $400 or less, which is more than half the cost of the latest flagship model. The real question is how much a slightly better screen is worth to you? $100, maybe, but $400 for a better screen? The author wasn't putting this out there as a universal truism, he was just pointing out that, for a lot of people, "pretty good" is often "good enough."

That nice. Suppose you're someone who has decided that your next phone need not be the latest flagship model. When the time comes to buy a new phone, you could take that writer's advice, and buy a less expensive model, and you'd be slightly better off. You'd be slightly more better off, however, if you implemented a simple micro-change: If you were paying $40/month for your old phone, and your new one costs $25/month, you can now take the difference ($40 - $25 = $15/month) and set up a monthly deposit into your savings or investment account. You're not going to retire early on a $15/month savings plan, but it's better than the $0/month plan. What's more, you won't even feel the difference because you're already paying $40 per month. This way, your lifestyle stays exactly the same, but you end up with money in the bank. Now that's a micro-change.

The real power of micro-changes, though, is that they stack. Saving $15 per month on your cell phone bill won't make you a millionaire, but if you manage to combine that with the savings you get from shopping around on your insurance bill, your utility bills, down-sizing to a more affordable car, and so on, before you know it you'll be saving hundreds of dollars per month and investing in financial security with virtually no cost to your overall lifestyle.

For this to work, however, it's important that you choose line items that reflect your values. If you're not the kind of person who can get away with an inferior cell phone, then you're better off spending the extra $15 per month and being happy! The cell phone isn't the point. The point is that there is something in your life much like a cell phone, something that you won't mind buying the cheap version of. Buy that cheaper version of whatever it is and invest the difference.

Micro-changes can be applied to so much more than personal finance. Consider the office. You're stuck in one place for hours at a time; you may as well get a standing work station or an under-the-desk exercise bike, if you can tolerate either. You'll never get a real workout that way, but it's a low-cost way to make your health just slightly better than it might be otherwise. Or take a break every hour and do a set of push-ups. You get two legally mandated 15-minute coffee breaks per eight hours of work; maybe you smoke or like to drink coffee, but you might consider spending that time going for a brisk walk. That's two miles of walking per day, for some people, and the only lifestyle change you'll have to make is bringing a pair of sensible shoes with you to work.

Modern technology facilitates micro-changes like these so well that there's almost no excuse. A bread machine can make you a fresh loaf of bread that's warm and ready-to-eat when you wake up; it makes it while you're sleeping! Coffee machines can be run on a timer, too. Suddenly, you don't have to waste time making breakfast in the morning; there's a micro-change for you. (If you like, you can even program this into your "smart home" machinery.) Crock pots can make your dinner for your while you're at work. Life is so easy!

But in order to capitalize on it, you have to identify your life's potential margins. Where are you willing to give up a little? Where are your pain points? Where do you lose the most time? What gets in the way of your savings or your health the most? Find these things, and make micro-changes on the margin. Before you know it, your life will get much better!

Keep It Positive

The Gottman Institute put together some famous research that demonstrates that successful marriages have a so-called "magic ratio" of five positive interactions for every negative interaction. It makes perfect sense that people in successful relationships would have more positive interactions than negative ones. The Gottmans' research simply quantifies that.

If you're in a long-term romantic relationship, or you want to be, then keeping in mind the "magic ratio" is a good idea. Go out of your way to interact positively with your partner, and not only will you improve your odds of relationship success, you'll also give yourself an important emotional buffer of sorts for whatever inevitable negative interaction that may occur in the future.

Like so many other things to come out of relationship research, however, this one is a lesson that can be applied to all of your relationships, not just your marriage. If you want to be popular and well-regarded at work, make an effort to ensure that most of your interactions with your colleagues are positive ones. If you want to maintain strong friendships, make sure you're interacting positively with your friends. If you want to get along with your roommates, keep interactions mostly positive. It's just good human advice.

Recently I had to remove a couple of people from my life because their reactions to me were consistently negative. I know that deep down, both of them are good people, but it was becoming difficult to keep reminding myself of that fact when they spent so much time insulting me. Good people sometimes do bad things, and sometimes they do bad things persistently and for a long period of time. In a short while, I will have forgiven them. In the meantime, though, there is no reason to keep exposing myself to insults, irritants, and downers. I have to live my life, after all. I interact with more people over the course of a day than just these two. If I allowed them to bring me down so often, it would eventually spill over into my other relationships and ruin my life. I can't allow that.

It's a twin lesson to learn. On the one hand, it's important to keep negative influences at bay. On the other hand, it's important to remember that if you're the negative influence, people will begin to keep you at bay, too. As aforementioned, if you want to maintain good relationships, you have to manage your interactions ratio.

Remember, too, that negative interaction is inevitable in any long-term relationship of any kind. If you spend enough time with anyone, you will eventually have some kind of conflict. But these conflicts can be more easily managed and recovered from if you're generally accustomed to interacting well with one another.

Or, on the flip-side, if you've been going through some stuff lately, and you know you've been a pill, take some time to foster positive interactions with the people around you. Maybe you can't undo what you did, but you can send people a reminder that you're not a pill.

The "magic ratio" is such a powerful idea that it extends to everything. I've written before about how I don't use Twitter because I consider the social environment on that medium to be hostile and unpleasant. Instead, I use Instagram and follow a bunch of outdoorsmen, pro athletes, and models. When I open up Instagram, all I see are photos of beautiful, smiling people in beautiful landscapes. I see models hitting the famous landmarks of major European cities. I see mountaineers summiting gorgeous, remote mountains in pristine ranges. I see professional marathoners training in the African high plains, or in Mallorca, or in Flagstaff. I see local runners logging miles on some of my favorite local routes. No matter whose photo I see next, it's a consistently positive experience for me. Whatever I'm doing and whatever the world is like for me, out there, in athlete-celebrity-model world, there are beautiful people having lots of fun in beautiful places, and so will I be soon.

It's the perfect demonstration of how surrounding yourself with positivity can improve your life, but it's also a reminder to keep your own social media posts positive. Reconsider sharing that angry political meme, and instead share a photo of you and your family doing something fun. Think twice about posting yet another selfie and instead turn the camera around; show the world the beauty of wherever you happen to be standing at that moment. No matter who you are, there is someone out there who could see your post and think, "That looks like an interesting place!"

If you see a social media post about exercise, give that person some kudos! Let them know that you admire their work. And if you're in the gym or out on the trails and you happen to see someone trying to take an exercise selfie, offer to snap that photo for them instead. When you see someone wearing a cool hat, tell them how cool you think it is.

Spread the positivity around. It feeds on itself and helps make the lives around you a lot better. You'll feel better doing it! Let's keep this world a positive place to be.

Hole In The Data

Over the years, I've really come to love cycling. As any cyclist will tell you, there is something magical about pedaling rapidly down a long, scenic road or path with the wind in your face and the sounds of the world around you. It is a thrilling way to travel, and a wonderful way to get some exercise.

In that spirit, I recently decided to incorporate a long bike ride into my weekly workout regimen, on Sundays, in lieu of a "rest day." Cycling is far less aerobically intensive than running, at least when you cycle like I do, and so it has the overall feel of an active rest day.

As longtime readers of this blog know, my bicycle is a single-speed Windsor Clockwork. Riding a single-speed bike means that my average and maximum speeds are limited on the upper end. While people riding multi-gear bicycles can easily achieve speeds above 30 miles per hour on flat ground, such speeds seem virtually impossible to me. That was an intentional choice, by the way; when I first started shopping for bicycles, I was so uncomfortable on thin-tired road racers that I wanted to cap my top speed as an added safety measure. It's hard to smash your face if you're never going fast enough to cause real damage in the first place. Another consequence of all this is that I tend to expend more physical effort at the same level of speed than riders with fancier bikes. Again, I knew this going into my initial purchase of a single-speed bicycle; having a more difficult time pedaling the bicycle means that I'll get a better workout than others. No "cheating" by down-shifting on the uphills, and 30 miles of riding is a good, hard ride for me. And, of course, the frame itself is made of steel; comfortable, durable, and inexpensive, yes, but certainly not light or fast.

In light of my bicycle's inherent challenges, I've set sane goals for my weekly ride. At some point in the future, I'd like to build up to a 50-mile ride,  A.K.A a "half-century." That would say something about my endurance on the bike. At another point (almost certainly not on a 50-mile ride!), I'd like to log a ride for which my average speed is 17 miles per hour. For me, these are do-able goals, and since I have no time constraints getting in my way, they're fun things to shoot for, good ways to add some focus to my cycling when otherwise I'd just be out riding for kicks.

Yesterday, I got up before dawn, at four o'clock in the morning, to be exact. I wanted to start riding before the heat kicked in, and I also wanted to be back in time for breakfast. I hit the road while it was still dark outside, attracting moths and gnats and bats. I rode through the industrial part of town, where roads are wide and sparsely trafficked on Sundays, then along the river here in the city to a few cultural landmarks before circling back through some of the nicer neighborhoods until I reached home.

I rolled up to my garage and my GPS had me at over 37 miles of cycling - my longest ride yet. I still had plenty of aerobic energy; the data from my ride shows that I spent almost all of the ride at or below heart rate zone 1. But, after 37 miles of single-speed work, my legs were exhausted. My quadriceps burned with lactic acid and they had long since lost their "bounce." I burned over 1,300 calories while riding and gave my leg muscles a good, hard workout. It felt great, and I'm already looking forward to next week's ride.

Reviewing my statistics on Strava and Garmin Connect, however, I was a little disappointed to find that my 37-mile ride, my longest ride ever, my great Sunday morning excursion, was basically scored as "no activity" in my health and fitness statistics. The reason is entirely a data classification issue.

That is, at both Strava and Garmin Connect, my primary activity type is set to "running." This is as it should be, of course, but the problem with that is that my fitness and training load statistics are thus calculated only from running activities, i.e. activities tagged explicitly as "running." I could do thirteen hours of intense bicycle intervals across 300 miles of tough terrain, and it wouldn't impact my "training load" or "fitness curve" at all. In fact, both my load and my fitness curve would decrease that day, since I would have failed to log a "running" activity.

Since I've grown accustomed to monitoring my training load using my Strava and Garmin accounts, I was chagrined to put in an awesome ride yesterday morning and not get a little numerical "boost" for my good, hard work. In some ways, this is a problem with the way these companies calculate their statistics.

In other ways, though, it is a purely epistemic problem. I don't need to log on to the internet to know that I had a great workout yesterday. I don't need to see my "fatigue curve" climb in order to know that my muscles are tired. I don't need to see a little trophy graphic to know that it was my longest ride ever and that I climbed more vertical feet than on any previous road ride. I don't need to see a "Relative Effort Score" of over 100 to know that my two-and-a-half-hour ride was more exhausting than last week's tempo run. But the brain sees numbers and processes them as cardinal values, anyway.

The truth is that I know how hard my ride was, what a great workout it was, how much good it did me as an athlete, and how much fun I had doing it. Internet algorithms might not know it, and internet kudos values might not reflect the intrinsic value of the ride to me. But this is one problem technology cannot solve. In at least this regard, we may have been better off in the days before GPS watches, when all we really had to go on was time, distance on the (paper, hard-copy) map, and the subjective fatigue we felt after the fact. We never felt bad about not showing a numerical improvement, because there were no numbers staring back at us. We had memories, instead.

Well, it's an epistemic problem, but not an insurmountable one. Just as the brain can be trained to think carefully about its cognitive biases and deliberately work against them, so can we train the brain to accept that internet fitness data is just there as a fun thing to track. It doesn't make or break your workouts, nor even a year's worth of workouts. We have more tangible means of assessing our progress. Sometimes the absence of an uptick in the data merely serves as a reminder to us that we should pay more attention to the physical sensation of exercise, and perhaps less attention to quantitative, algorithmically calculated benchmarks.

Economics For Your Mental Health?

I don't know why it popped up on my feed this morning, but I saw a link to two-year-old news that Instagram is the social medium that is supposedly "worst for mental health."

Of course, I have written before that I like Instagram much better than other social media, and I have surmised that one of the reasons for this is because I have curated my Instagram feed much differently than my other social media accounts. Rather than following friends and relatives on Instagram, I instead follow famous or interesting people who take photographs of things I want to see: beautiful places, cute animals, great acts of outdoor sporting, appealing fashion, and so on. If it tends to bring me joy when I see it, I'll follow it on Instagram. If it tends to upset or bore me, I won't. I don't spend a lot of time on Instagram, but whenever I use it, it gives me a smile.

The question is, why is my experience so at odds with that of the average person?

Recently, I have seen other reports about how fitness trackers make people miserable and impede their athletic progress. Meanwhile, regular readers will note that my experience with fitness trackers tends to be the exact opposite. I love them. I love Strava. I love seeing all that data, getting the kudos, seeing what kinds of workouts other people are doing, how their races went, and so on. It's wonderful.

In thinking about both of these things, I realized that there are really two different ways of seeing it.

Suppose you log on to Instagram and see a beautiful woman's photos of a beautiful life in a beautiful place, with loving friends and family, and fun happening all the time. One reaction you might have is to be happy for that woman. After all, there is a lot for her to be happy about. You could pay attention to the fun things she does and the nice photos she takes, and you could try to learn lessons to apply to your own life. Do you love all the photos she takes of the beach? Then maybe you should find more time to go to the beach. Do you love all the time she spends with her family? Then maybe you should spend more time with your family. Do you love how glamorous her photos are? Then maybe you and your friends could practice taking glamorous photos of each other. In small ways, you can learn from people who appear to be doing something right, and make your own life better at the margins. It's unlikely that you'll ever live the beautiful life of a social media influencer, but that shouldn't mean that you can't apply a few of their best successes to your own little world.

That's how I feel when I see these Instagram accounts. That's how I feel when I see people post their workouts on Strava. It encourages me, inspires me, and gives me something to learn from.

Other people, though, have another way of seeing it. To them, the fact that they'll never be able to live the glamorous life they see depicted on Instagram is a source of sadness. They want that life, they know they can't have it, and it makes them feel sad. They see someone on Strava logging 80 miles of running per week, and they lament that it can't be them. Or else, they become obsessive about logging an 80-mile week and end up hurting themselves. Anything good that they see on social media becomes a contrast to their own lives. That someone can live a fabulous life implies, in their minds, that their own lives are somehow less-worth-living.

One major difference between these two ways of seeing things is that the first way, my way, involves thinking at the margins: How can I make small changes to what I'm doing so that I can live a little better? The second way involves dichotomous thinking: My life isn't as good as theirs. Dichotomous thinking is pathological to a long list of psychological problems, most obviously depression. The more you see things as all-good or all-bad, the more any small bad thing will bother you, because it implies that everything is bad.

This makes me wonder: Do people who think at the margins - economists, and the like - fare better when it comes to their psychological wellbeing? Could it be that economic training could improve people's perspectives by training them to think less dichotomously?

I think it's worth investigating.

Every Number But The One That Counts

I mentioned a few posts back that I had lost patience with heart rate zone training and was moving back to training "my way." Of course, it's still far too early to decide whether this is a good training decision or a bad one, but I'm already seeing changes in the data my various apps are presenting to me.

The most notable of such data comes from Garmin's "Training Status" report. (I blogged about what "Training Status" is, and how to interpret it, here.) My first day of doing things "my way" was this past Monday, May 6th. From April 26th through May 5th, my Training Status had been shown as "Unproductive." I was working out plenty, but it was apparently not doing my body any good. I felt that way, too. My runs felt sluggish, mostly because I was forcing myself to run slow in order to keep my heart rate down. The moment I decided to train "my way," my Training Status immediately switched back over to "Productive" and stayed there. My VO2 max estimate went back up to 61, from 59. I take these numbers with a grain of salt, but I do believe them in the sense that I think they offer some kind of "directional read."

By contrast, my Fitness graph at Strava has flattened-out at about 90 points. The trend is either flat or even possibly in a slight downward direction there since I switched back to training "my way." So, by Strava's algorithmic estimation, I am perhaps losing a bit of my physical fitness by training my way, versus training according to Garmin's HR zone training schedule.

All of these statistics, however, are generated by running heart rate, speed, and distance data into various "impulses," i.e. mathematical models designed to estimate fitness. So, these apps give me VO2 max estimates, estimates of training load and fitness, of my "status," and so on. That's every number a person could ever possibly want to know about their running.

Every number, that is, except one; arguably, the only one that counts: Average pace.

Relative to my previous week of running, my average pace has increased twelve seconds per mile. That's even after a particularly bad workout on Tuesday afternoon and despite the fact that my heart rate has not increased all that much. The main thing is that I simply haven't deliberately slowed myself down.

Pace is really the only number that counts. If you're capable of running at a particular pace, then you should. If you can't, then you should try to get yourself there. All this heart rate zone training and various "easy runs" versus other kinds of runs are all in service of increasing your average pace. If you're not increasing your average pace - or, if you're an older guy, maintaining a strong average pace - then your training isn't doing much for you at all.

For all the lovely metrics modern running apps offer you, don't forget the one that matters most.

Garmin Connect Update

After the latest round of Garmin updates, my Forerunner 645 watch can no longer sync with the Garmin Connect calendar automatically. This means that if I want to schedule a workout and have my watch automatically walk me through it, I need to connect my watch to a personal computer and use the old "Garmin Express" desktop application to manage the file transfer.

Needless to say, this is highly inconvenient. As inconvenient as it is, it's worth keeping things in perspective. Just a few years ago, this was the only way to do it, anyway. It is only Garmin's technological advancement that ever enabled us to move beyond hard-wired file transfers for workouts on running watches. We've been spoiled by modernity. Still, no one likes moving backwards. This was a functionality that I was enjoying from my watch; it's no fun to see it disappear.

From what I can tell, the newer Garmin watches, including their newest offerings just recently released, do not have this problem. They synchronize automatically without issue. My suspicion is that these new watches use a different bit of software code to handle the transfer, and Garmin decided that it didn't want to support the older platform anymore. I work in tech and have some familiarity with this kind of decision-making. From a consumer's standpoint, it can be frustrating, but ultimately it is an economic decision. Every technology company eventually reaches a point where it has to decide how many of its resources it can afford to spend on the support of older products and applications. The world of apps and smart watches moves particularly fast, and unlike Samsung and Apple, Garmin must support devices on multiple smartphone platforms. It is not always as simple as maintaining the old code and adding new code. Imagine supporting every watch on every version of Android and every version of iOS. It's a lot of work, and it's not the only thing that Garmin does as a company. They also develop and manufacture hardware, improve the state of GPS tracking technology, and so on. Their latest app, along with their latest watches even track menstrual cycles and can predict if you're coming down with a cold. With all this new technology being released, I can forgive them for requiring me to simply plug my watch into my computer from time to time to sync my training schedule. It's a minor thing.

But I wanted to write about it here on the blog, since I spend a lot of time blogging about smart watches and reporting on their various technological issues. For those of you shopping for a new smart watch and interested in guided workouts that sync to your watch from your app, you'll want to choose a new Garmin watch, rather than one of the older ones.

Coincidentally, this is probably the most convenient time for me to experience this deprecation of features. As I recently wrote, I'm not following the Garmin HR-based training schedule anymore and had been modifying my workouts to involve pace targets instead. That meant that all the future workouts that had been synced to my watch were the old HR-based ones that I had been disregarding while I attempted to re-configure all the workouts on my calendar. For me, it all works out fine in the end. For the next day or two, I can complete my workouts "the old-fashioned way," by simply using my watch as a stopwatch that tracks my GPS data. No big deal. Then I'll finish editing my workouts and upload them to my watch manually. Problem solved.

The Instagram Funhouse Mirror

I have an account on almost all social media, but the only social media I regularly use are Instagram and Strava. I've mentioned both of them on the blog before, but I'll say it again. I use Strava because it is very inspiring and motivating; it makes me want to work out more when I see all the fun workouts other people are doing; it makes me want to run faster when I see how fast everyone else is running. Strava is great fun. I use Instagram because seeing nice photographs of beautiful people having lots of fun makes me happy; it makes me also want to go out and have fun. In fact, I like it so much that I created my own hashtag over it: #havefuntakephotos. This hashtag represents the whole reason I like Instagram. If we all spent more time having fun and taking photos of the fun we were all having, the world would be a better place. I just love it.

Participating in all the fun we're having on Instagram, however, is not as easy as it sometimes appears to be. If, like me, you follow a lot of famous people and "influencers," then you're likely to see many several photographs per day that you'd be lucky to snap in two weeks' time. There's a reason for this: famous people and professional "influencers" invest an enormous amount of time, and often a substantial amount of money, in creating content for their Instagram accounts. It's no mere coincidence that models and actresses are always photogenic and ready with a winning smile several times a day. What the viewer is seeing is often a professionally shot photograph, perhaps an outtake from a paid photo shoot, or a photo taken  months ago in ideal conditions, but only posted today.

Like anything else, you must view Instagram while maintaining the suspension of disbelief. There are only two possibilities: Either a person's life is not really what it looks like on Instagram, or the person has enough wealth to dedicate all that time and money to turning their life into an Instagram account. Either way, you, the average person, are not capable of producing the same kind of content on your own Instagram account unless and until you become a millionaire and/or hire a professional to create content for you.

This is all perfectly obvious, of course, but it became more obvious to me when I undertook the seemingly simple task of posting a photo of every workout I completed from the beginning of my 16-week half marathon training schedule to the end. I'm on week #11, and I haven't come anywhere close to posting one photo per workout. One reason is because I don't like to run with my phone (which is also my camera) strapped to me at all times. I'd rather leave my phone home and pick it up again when my workout is over. And when I'm in a rush to get to work or something, I don't always want to invest the extra five minutes in thinking up a clever Instagram concept-shot, figuring out how to snap it, and then posting it on the internet for all to see.

But the more important reason is this: If I posted a photo of what really happens during my workout, then every photo would look almost exactly the same. The photos would all be along similar routes and landscapes. I have about a week's worth of running clothes, so you'd only ever see me in one of seven shirts. I most often take photos right in front of my house, or from the parking lot outside of work, so you'd only really ever see the same two spots over and over again. I could post photos of other stuff - like, the locker room in my gym, or my blender bottle, or the treadwear on my running shoes - and sometimes I do; but I can only really post so many photos of that.

The point is, when you start cataloging life as it actually is, rather than as we would like it to look on Instagram, then it starts to look very repetitive and uninteresting. Granted, my own life might be a bit more routinized than other peoples' lives, but I suspect not by a wide margin. I think most of us do more or less the same things every day. Think of how many bowls of chopped papaya Milind Soman has posted on Instagram. If I followed his lead, you'd see a bowl of oatmeal in my "Stories" each and every day. I don't know, maybe I should do that, but who wants to stare at my bowl of oatmeal? Even I don't look very closely at it while I'm eating it.

Life - real life - is repetitive and, at least in photos, largely uninteresting. That's why our grandparents only ever took photos when the family got together at holidays. The rest of the time, who cares? Would you want to see a photo of your grandpa smiling into the camera from the driver's seat as he headed off to work? Maybe once, and only for ironic reasons. You certainly wouldn't have wanted to go through a box of that stuff when it was time to clear up his estate.

In the funhouse mirror of Instagram, beautiful people appear to be living beautiful lives, but in reality they just have very good photographers and publicists who ably present the Vanity Fair version of their lives. You don't see the daily bowl of cereal, the commute to work, the business emails and the paperwork, the license renewals, the dental floss, or the trip to the grocery store. You don't see the standing in line or the waiting in the airport lounge, you don't see the second cup of tea and the mindless internet scrolling. You don't see the 25,000 steps I took while running last Sunday, even if you did see my post about going for a long run. You don't see the laundry or the dishes.

Instead, you just see the fun parts. It's nice to see all the fun parts, but it's important to remember that, when you're scrolling through a long newsfeed full of nothing but fun parts, there were hours' worth of banalities that lead up to that photograph, and those banalities were not often worth however many "likes" the photo got.

It's fun to see this stuff, but it is definitely not reality.

On Reshma Saujani And Girls Who Code

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to hear a speech made by Reshma Saujani, founder of the organization Girls Who Code. The speech was, in effect, an explanation of why the Girls Who Code organization exists, according to its founder. The speech was quite polarizing to the audience - polarizing for both men and women in the audience, I must note - mostly because Saujani's mission is transparently partisan.

Saujani is, after all, a former politician and two-time failed congressional candidate for the Democratic party. She mentioned this throughout her speech. She mentioned the Democratic Party by name multiple times, and repeatedly referred to herself as a feminist. It's no surprise that a person like that would give a polarizing speech. We live in a polarized world, politically speaking, anyway.

During her speech, I learned a few more things about Saujani. One was that Saujani herself doesn't know how to code. I found this remarkably odd, for a couple of reasons. First, we've all heard that old phrase, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Saujani considers it very, very important that girls learn how to code; but apparently not important enough to warrant learning herself to code. I guess she thinks it's very, very important for other females to learn to code. Note: she never mentioned why she didn't learn to code.

The second reason I thought it was odd that Saujani doesn't know how to code relates to her reasons for founding her organization in the first place. The way she tells the story, she gained some familiarity with the tech community and started asking herself, "Where are the girls?" She then looked into the matter and discovered that girls don't often choose to study computer programming or become coders. Shen then reasoned, as feminists are wont to do, that girls choose other career paths for reasons of the Patriarchy; namely, the world of computer programming is supposedly "toxic," and "we" teach girls from a young age that they can't do things like code.

Saujani's point is that, if girls want to code, we should support them in that choice. To the extent that anyone ought to be supported in their choices, I agree. That is, if my daughter decided she wanted to learn to code, I'd help her learn and give her all the encouragement she deserves.

But it's important to note that Saujani chose to do something else with her life, other than code, because that's what she wanted. And, according to Saujani herself, girls are choosing careers other than coding, because that's what they want. It is not, however, what Saujani wants girls to choose. Saujani wants girls to make a different choice: to code. So Saujani started an organization whose mission is to steer girls away from what they would otherwise choose to do, toward coding instead.

That is, Saujani doesn't want girls to do as they choose. She wants them to do as Saujani chooses. That doesn't sound like any version of feminism that's appealing to me.

Of course, a straight-forward, albeit cynical, reading of the situation is this: Saujani wants to influence young women and nudge them toward her political ideology. Currently, coders and data analyst hold a lot of power within American society. We're the "cool" career (for now), we command high salaries, and the executives at our firms hold the ear of the Washington power brokers (again, for now). So what Saujani really wants is a piece of that power.

This makes the situation increasingly more odd, though. Saujani is obviously an intelligent woman; so intelligent that I'd wager she'd make a great coder. She is also a reasonably high-profile woman with a certain amount of fame, and that would be enough to get her a foot in the door at any top tech firm, if she had coding chops, too. It seems to me that she could have earned a seat at the same table with a lot less effort if she had done it "the old-fashioned way," by taking a good coding job and working her way up.

Hearing her speak, however, it's as though the thought never even occurred to her. The politician's mentality is something I will never fully understand.

P.S. - Throughout Saujani's presentation, she slung various insults at the stereotypical male coder, and the audience got a big kick out of it, judging by the laughs. I didn't think it was funny, though, and more importantly, I thought it weakened her case. Here's a woman ostensibly trying to, among other things, eliminate discrimination and harassment of women in the high-tech workplace while she herself is committing the same kind of harassment against the males in that environment. Again, that doesn't sound like any version of feminism that's appealing to me.

Getting Sick And Using Technology

Here's a little introspection for you.

I came down with a cold this week, which finally "hit me" on Monday, but which didn't really get going until Wednesday.

As a brief aside, let me make an observation about myself. For most of my life, when I got a cold, I got a cold. It was what it was. A few years ago, however, my colds started behaving differently. Instead of just getting a cold, I'll often have several days of constant post-nasal drip that requires constant "management" in order to prevent severe sore throats and chest congestion. And that's before the cold itself ever really "hits." Why does this happen now? Why did it never happen before? I cannot figure out why the behavior of every cold I get would suddenly change. There must be some medical explanation for this, but I haven't been able to find it.

Anyway, the cold finally got going on Wednesday. I woke up with a massive headache, and my head and ears felt… mushy. In the past, I've used the following analogy: It felt like my head was full of oatmeal. But in this case, my head seemed to be stuffed so full of oatmeal that I could scarcely think. I wandered around in a daze. I forced fluids, slept, lied about on the couch watching movies, drank many several cans of chicken broth, and so on. When I adhere to this kind of regimen, my cold symptoms will usually have subsided by the following morning.

Unfortunately, that's not what happened. I woke up Thursday morning with an even more massive headache and, incomprehensibly, more proverbial oatmeal stuffed into my skull. I was miserable. I was coughing, and each cough was unbearably painful on my throat. My nose was full of congestion. My ears felt infected. I couldn't stay awake for more than a couple of hours at a time. My blood sugar was off the charts. I guzzled a gallon of water well before noon, and kept drinking tea, water, and chicken broth throughout the day. It was truly awful.

Somehow, by about noon on Thursday, my cough had become less painful and more productive, which enabled me to rid myself of some of that oatmeal. I took a nap in a bathtub full of hot water and eucalyptus oil. I managed to take a two-mile walk to get some sunlight and fresh air, and to help reduce my blood sugar. Then I cooked myself a small, low-carb meal and took an extra insulin correction while forcing more fluids throughout the night. By bedtime, I had normal blood sugar again and was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I woke up this morning feeling much better. Not healthy, mind you, but better. Most of the coughing and runny nose is gone. There's still a little congestion, and a prevailing sense of weakness and mental haze, but I can tell that my body is climbing up out of the hole, rather than falling down in it.

As you might imagine, one of the most frustrating aspects of having a cold like this is not being able to work out. I missed my half marathon workouts on Wednesday and Thursday. Today is supposed to be a cross-training day, and because cycling take much less effort than running, I may head out on the bicycle after work. I don't want to over-do it, of course, but it's a balancing act. Too little activity pushes my blood sugar up so high than I cannot fight the illness; too much will prolong the congestion and malaise. A 15-20 mile afternoon bike ride seems like just the ticket to me.

But not being able to do a workout is one thing. Not being able to log a workout on Strava and Garmin is another thing entirely! One of the downsides of "gamifying" your workouts is that if for some reason you find yourself simply unable to work out, you lose the game. This is unlike a traditional game, where you can generally save your progress and leave it until you can get back to it. With fitness games, the more you work out, the more you win; the less you work out, the more you lose. It's a useful environment when all ceteris is paribus, but when you're sick, it sure would be nice to be able to save the game. Meanwhile, all my Strava connections are posting great workouts and look like they're having lots of fun. I'm missing out.

During times like these, it's important to remind yourself that being sick is simply part of the game. No one avoids all illness, all the time. Training for a half marathon takes, in my case, sixteen weeks. It's unlikely that a non-professional athlete will ever find 112 uninterrupted days of training. Life happens. Sometimes you're sick, sometimes you have to meet a family or work commitment, sometimes you miss a flight, and so on.

It's easy to get caught up in the notion that, because you planned your life for 112 days, if your plans become disrupted for some reason, then you've ruined the 112 days. It's a plan, not a reality. The reality is that we intend to do a series of workouts, or meet a schedule of obligations. The best way to meet a schedule is to master the ability of rescheduling when life inevitably happens. Or, in the case of training for a specific event, like I am, accepting that I had to miss a few days of training because I was sick.

What's funny is that when I was at my most competitive level of training, I never felt as though missing a day -- or even a week -- was a compromise to my whole season. It might have been a frustrating setback, but I never thought, "Well, now I'll never be ready for regionals!" It's an outgrowth of this digitized, gamified, social media approach to fitness that missed days start to offset things on the digital experience and mess up your training.

And, to that end, we come to an important truth about the role of technology in our lives. I am an enormous technophile. Whatever the new technology, I say bring it on and let society progress. The more, the better. I love technology. And yet, we still need to be able to draw a line where technology ends and life begins. Technology ought to be a tool that improves human existence, not a constraint that dictates how we live.

It's not as if cavemen invented the hammer and then stopped building things that couldn't be built with hammers. Hammers are wonderful; hammers are important; but hammers are just one technology and if something cannot be hammered, then we need to be able to either choose a different tool or work with no tool at all. The same is true for digital fitness technology. I think this technology has been wonderful for sports like running, swimming, and cycling; I think it has improved the quality of my training and the efficacy of my workouts. But I'm not running for the technology or even through the technology. I'm merely using the technology.

So, if I happen to catch a cold, my various "apps" might not be able to capture that aspect of training; but no big deal. I can take the time to recuperate and then re-join my training schedule wherever it is when I feel up to it again. Just like I did before all this training technology existed in the first place.