Observation Bias

Thoughts on Counting Things in the Social Sphere

It’s a new year and social media feeds are exploding with evidence of things counted. And as the days of goal-reaching posts have worn on, it's had me pondering the meaning of it all, so here you go: the swirling contents of my head, right here, for all to ponder/swirl along with me.

Apologies in advance.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In principle, counting is pretty neutral.

It’s just data. The simplest data analysis is tracking your performance against a goal: my goal was to do X things, and I missed it, hit it, or exceeded it.

However, the very fact that you observe something enough to count it actually affects the data - this known as Observation Bias.

The most prevalent posts I’ve seen like this are the Goodreads¹ summary posts. How many books read, how many pages read, the shortest book, the longest book, the averages, etc., and in the case of goals missed, the addition of an apologetic list of what got in the way of hitting the goal.

It’s not just the goal, but the judgements

What has caused me to fret my way into writing this post is the weighing of SELF against the data.

How you use data is not a neutral thing, and it’s so very easy to analyze said data to your detriment - we are barraged with messages that sell us things to "cure" our inadequacies, so it's not hard to find things to feel inadequate about. And analyzing it in the public sphere of social media, where the performance of perfection is constantly shoveled down our throats, worries me greatly. Especially the apologies.

Especially the apologies.

Why are we apologizing for essentially being the perfectly imperfect humans we are?

I have one friend that showed a pile of her fave books of the year, and she apologized for some of the kid-lit and YA² stuff in the pile, like the presence of it dinged her cred as a reader. Huh? Who defines the cred criteria?

And is the post that shows you blew past your goal signifying that you are hopefully, acceptably, good enough?

Why do we put our goals out in the public confessional of social media?

Is it accountability? Is it community-building to see everyone else’s reading performance? Is it inspirational? Aspirational? Is it more “content” to feed the platform beast that downgrades your visibility if you miss a few days? Or is it some sort of signaling of (icky) competitiveness or (ickier) superiority?

Don’t get me wrong - I find some goals motivational, and most of them require counting in some form.

But going back to Observation Bias, your count is affected because you’re counting.

If you have a goal, and a process that tracks to the goal (like logging your books in Goodreads) the next book you pick up is affected by that. Might you push yourself to pick up the next book in a moment where you would rather not be reading? Or if you’re ahead of your goal, will you pick up a more complex book to up your page count or average book length? Because you want these data to look good when you perform them at the end of the year? Are you reading Jane Eyre because it’s a fave or because you’ll look smarter³ if you log it?

And to be clear… I’m asking questions here, not defining correct answers (there are none) because I really am interested in your thoughts.

My version?

I will admit that the contrary being in me wants to post something like this in counterpoint:

• I read some books⁴

• I ate some foods

• I did some exercise

• I made some stuff

• Happy New Year!

• 😎

But then I note that the public performance of even that is a thing!

What’s worth counting?

I guess if I’m going to count things, I want to count the things like how many times I reached out to a friend, or sent a silly card, or ate great food with my pals, or exchanged daft memes with my son, or consciously, deeply filled my lungs with fresh air.

But all will still be affected by counting, so I think I’ll avoid the stress of potentially judging myself over it, just do them as I can, and call that plenty good enough.

1. I find Amazon’s ownership of the Goodreads platform problematic also because you know your data will be used to fuel capitalistic money extraction processes.

2. She’s a cool mum with a YA-reading kiddo so I would expect her interests to go there. Color me impressed at her diligence.

3. Look smarter to whom?

4. I used to log the books I read in a journal and resisted Goodreads despite the urging of friends. I quit doing it in grad school out of lack of time, and because I couldn’t figure out how to count partially-read books that are the foundation of most research. Once school was done, I didn’t return to counting because I noticed that not counting freed me to just read what and when I wanted to - which for the first year was a steady diet of nothing remotely challenging or “important.” Read: lightweight beach reads and "worse" (as in the entire Twilight series in 11 days flat). Which, had I been plugging them into Goodreads, would have caused me to self-judge, manipulate the data (omitting the worst offenders), and worry about how I, with my shiny MFA, would be perceived for reading anything less than academic.