The Hedonism of Logging

Imagine that you start training your model. You open tensorboard or wandb. You see curves, beautiful curves. They come in sparkling colors and some are related to losses others to metrics others even to the power consumption of your GPU. But nothing isn’t that sublime as this moment that you look the curves develop through time, the suspense you have of what will happen, the feeling of surprise that meets you when after a night of beers with friends or wine (if you are in Paris), you come home and you open your logging program and you see that your loss smoothly approaches zero (or 0.082552924737).

There is a certain feeling of pleasure that comes with logging. I have noticed it and I don’t want suppress it but express it. It is the trick of fit-bit. How come a product that basically gives you a hospital monitor experience in your daily life (tracking your sleep, heart beat, heart pressure and more) appeal to a lot of individuals, who wouldn’t even like to go to the hospital for a visit? Yes you can argue: it is because of wellbeing. I wouldn’t disagree with that but I would further argue: it is about a hedonism of logging.

People are excited by keeping track of things. A friend’s father recently did a stress test. He went to the doctor and the doctor told him that he had high blood pressure. Then he went to the pharmacy and bought a (cheap) blood pressure monitoring device. He then went to the house and started measuring his blood pressure, something he hadn’t done before. My friend told me that he had the chimp like behavior of measuring his blood pressure every minute, resulting in a constantly recurring blip-vvv…vvv-blip-blip-blip sound.

Another story is STONKS: a well known meme having big empty-headed face with a shirt smiling on making money easily out of nothing. It’s just STONKS. This guy is happy because he is making money out of something, but he existentially doesn’t care about how it works as its not understandable. Stocks are not an objective measurement of something; they are just like the value of a variable inside a social algorithm. Stocks may look like what I want to talk about, but they are ultimately the opposite.

I know that measurement, comes with a suspense. I am sure there is a certain aesthetic of measurement and that someone should have written about it somewhere, but I don’t want to look for it online to appear smarter. Instead I want to focus on another topic, that of data-logging like a form of knowing and controlling (or monitoring) as a form of pleasure. It is the feeling of being in a cockpit and taking glimpses along all the monitors, to assure that you are on an optimal path. But yet what does monitoring truly offer you? I mean it is good to know the speed you are going with or your blood pressure or even the time in your day, but where does this excitement come from?

I am not sure yet, I haven’t found out. But, it may be much better if we all think of it? If you have a similar story to share please do :)