Free The Naked Future by Patrick Tucker

imagined,” he told me. For instance, he now knows that if he ignores his in-box for five days, it will take him two weeks to get up to date. He has a formula to estimate the likelihood that he will procrastinate on a given project, the average time of procrastination, and the best way to avoid it.
    â€œI’m one of these people that for certain types of tasks, there’s no point in starting early; I won’t finish it until just in time anyway. I have to know how long it’s actually going to take to finish so that I can get it done in an efficient way. If I start it too early, the task expands into the available space,” he says.
    Wolfram hopes that one day he’ll be able to use this painfully extracted self-knowledge to figure out when he’s at his creative peak. This is not an insignificant matter, as his life is devoted to solving problems that are supposed to be impossible. “What I’ve had to do is figure out an efficient scheme to create on demand. I’ve gotten better at it. I know that if I think about something for acertain period of time, a window will appear, a period of a few hours when I’ll either have a good idea or I won’t.”
    Wolfram’s experience speaks to one of the more important, near-term applications of QS. In the decade ahead, a lot more people will be tracking themselves to guard against something like the inside view.
    But Wolfram and Kurzweil have created what Ben Franklin couldn’t: a reference class of personal data that meets the criteria of “large enough to be significant.” And they did so at a cost of time and effort that—while still high—was lower for them than it would be for someone else. As a result, they are perhaps better armed against the inside view than the rest of us.
    If you’re not exactly eager to tabulate every step you take and every gram of sodium you ingest, some recent research suggests that you can greatly improve your health by simply watching just one signal: how you react to stressful events.
    In 2012 University of Pennsylvania researcher David Almeida and some colleagues published a paper showing that the most important predictor of a future chronic health condition (aside from smoking, drinking, and engaging in conspicuously unhealthy behavior) was overreacting to routine, psychologically taxing incidents. When they interviewed subjects about how little stressors such as car breakdowns, angry e-mails, small disappointments, the little annoyances of modern life, affected them emotionally, they found that “for every one unit increase in affective reactivity [people reporting a big emotional change resulting from the stressful event], there was a 10% increase in the risk of reporting a chronic health condition 10 years later.” 10
    The researchers didn’t find that people who were
exposed
to more stressful experiences were more likely to develop a chronic health condition. Rather, the increase was isolated to people who reported feeling very different emotionally on a day that they encountered a stressor than on a day when they did not. 11
    This is a classic inside-view problem. Very few people keep track of how they react to little stressors. The costs of keeping such arecord, in terms of inconvenience, are too high. Yet hidden in those reactions may be powerful clues to our future health. If it were easy and cheap to keep that data around, and if we were able to make sense of it quickly, we would surely keep a log of how stressed we felt at any given moment.
    When I asked Kahneman via Skype at the Singularity Summit 2012 what he thought of the self-quant trend, he was guardedly optimistic about the potential applications of quantification techniques for physicians. Adopting the outside view will never be intuitive, he said. “But at least in principle there is an opportunity for people to discover regularities in their own lives. There will be an opportunity to look at