As the Northeast gets hammered with a second major snowstorm I’m reminded of an idea my friend had a few years back: what if you could see a weather man’s track record? Flashing up on screen alongside the scrolling ticker of school closures and snowfall accumulations would be the fact that Bob was 8 for his last 10 forecasts. We can’t predict the weather but we could at least know who was right most often.
This got me thinking. What if we could see statistics for everybody not just meteorologists? What if daily life was permeated with quantitative analysis? We live in the era of Big Data so let’s put all that data to use. Let’s turn us all into the back of a baseball card.
What I’m imagining is an algorithm that can attach to the API of existing apps and services, and use back-end data, to publicly promote obscure information that would have previously remained hidden. I call it American Pi, a numbers based approach to improving our daily lives.
How would this improve our lives? Well, there’s nothing worse than texting someone, especially someone you just met, and waiting for a response. Is this person ghosting you or just busy? If you knew how quickly they usually respond to a text your mind would be at ease. Same thing goes for dating. Online apps force you to make key decisions – is this person my soul mate – based on minimal, highly selective information. The parts that the other person wants you to see. But what if you could see additional information? What if you could know, for example, that Joe gets second dates 87% of the time or that he offers to pay for the bill 100% of the time. Wouldn’t that help you make a better decision?
Same thing goes for the workplace. There is plenty of data about my job performance. How often I’m on time or late. How many tasks I’ve completed and how quickly. What score I got on my annual reviews. What if the next time I went on a job interview the prospective employer could see my personal performance statistics. Not just my resume or LinkedIN profile.
Now I’m not saying that we go to the extreme and rate everything we do. I wouldn’t want to have a number associated with my overall performance as a human being. I wouldn’t want that number to follow me around for the rest of my life. But what I am saying is that maybe, just maybe, we could find a few ways to better incorporate statistical information into our lives. This blog, for instance, could state that 10 out of 10 times Craig’s writing is informative, hilarious, and highly entertaining. But then again maybe we don’t need to do that at all. After all, some things in life are pretty obvious.
Is American Pi the Greatest Idea Ever?
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