siarshai

• siarshai 14 Mar 2026 7:45 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Alex A’s comment on: Prob­a­bly you won’t be able to perform a data-driven habit stack­ing for self-improvement

  Another anecdote: I know that staying up late and working on projects is a bad habit, but when I have a doubt about it and entertain a late-night working session, I can look at the actual data (even if subjective) and see that when I stay up past midnight, my quality of work goes down and I get a hit to my energy levels for 2-3 days following.

  This is a good point. I have very similar experience :) Let me edit conclusion section to clarify when data-driven approach is helpful.

• siarshai 14 Mar 2026 7:44 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Prob­a­bly you won’t be able to perform a data-driven habit stack­ing for self-improvement

  When it comes to lifting weights, I think the leading advice is to track the data for your weight lifting. The point isn’t to run t-tests about the effects of creatine but to see whether you are improving at the lifting exercise you are doing and changing exercises if you don’t. That’s data driven self improvement.

  There are a lot more dwarfs than the normal distribution would predict. There are some genetic mutations that have a relatively small effect on height and some that have a really big effect. … I think if you are doing data driven self improvement, you do care about the outliers in data that are driven by the equivalent of the genetic mutation for dwarfism. If you just see them as noise, I don’t think that’s helpful.

  Those are good points. Let me expand conclusion to clarify what I mean in my article and what I don’t mean—when data driven approach is helpful