14 Comments

Constant validating social interaction according to Randall Collins. More specifically something he refers to as "EDOM" (emotional domination) in his book "Napoleon never slept".It's being the center of a particular energetic group dynamic, but it's not parasitic. Everyone in such a dynamic is also energized to a lesser degree.I guess in Jordan Peterson terms, this is some kind of top lobster effect.

Though I find it also plausible that leaders not needing much sleep like Thatcher and Napoleon just happen to have.... well.... it's literally named "the Thatcher gene", that lets you get by with 4 hours.

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Does anyone have thoughts regarding what the biological origins of differing energy levels could be? It seems potentially hackable no?

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I said explicitly that we probably don't need their permission to see their energy and post it.

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Posting or not posting then becomes a signal, no?

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Yes. At least some people who have "amazing energy" use every moment they think they're unobserved to rest. To be able to present that appearance of energy?

I don't think your scheme will work, tho. I don't see the incentive to post the results publicly, unless they think they can gain social status by doing so. If their energy number is below average, why post it? So you get only cherry-picked (and therefore useless) numbers.

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Everyone always tries to move status markers to the things they have more of, and more control over info re. Don't see why this gives them any more power in that fight.

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People already try to look impressive. Our usual indicators still work in that context.

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Yes, that seems feasible.

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Wouldn’t people then consciously try to express more energy in the hope of making better impressions to land the job, school admittance, etc.? Sounds like a case of Goodhart’s Law.

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Even if you are correct, though, is this not a game of whack-a-mole? If these dimensions are compressed, would not elites simply advocate assigning status according to a more opaque measure that they have "special insight" into judging?

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So end users would browse and see that Alice has an energy level of 75, Bob of 21, Carol of 44, etc? Even if doing so takes less effort than trying to infer energy levels from eg. Facebook photos, it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that people would want to do.

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I believe smart watch sensors already collect all the needed data. They have accelerometers. Capture heart rate 24x7. My Garmin watch tracks my sleep cycles (REM sleep, deep sleep (motionless), light sleep). Apple watch does too. And if you wanted more accurate, all you'd need was video of relatively broad array of test subjects to normalize it against what a watch collects. Cheap and easy data to collect. Fitness trackers collect same kind of data as well of course.

Smartphone also have accelerometers as well of course, so that opens up an even larger dataset, assuming people keep it in their pocket all day. But probably best to go with a smartwatch, as easy to capture sleep as well, and already many have them, and the adta won't have as many gaps when people put watch down.

Google search just now found pew survey. Says smart watch + fitness tracker penetration is 21% in US, and 27% if college degree.https://www.pewresearch.org...

Seems like could even do a very cheap survey just using 100 college students who allowed you to pull their watch/fitness data.

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'Energy' is the name we give to one particular commonly observed feature of people. It is only one of many correlates of success. The idea here is just to measure this one feature better and more automatically.

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I am by no means a machine learning expert, but would it need to focus on 'energy'? Wouldn't any physically displayed attribute or habit that correlated with success be measurable in this way?

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