In your life, salsa dancing ability is definitely not the sole metric you wish to be optimizing for.
Things you presumably want to optimize might be something like personal happiness, bettering the world or wherever you find meaning.
If one truly wanted to drop resources into optimizing salsa ability, I’d imagine filming the dance floor from a few cellphones every week, uploading the video to youtube and paying a few experts on a salsa forum to give the dancers a rating and feedback would give a somewhat valid metric that you could go about tracking, quantifying and optimizing.
But I presume that that is not the primary goal of most salsa-goers. I guess that people go to salsa dancing nights because they are fun, good exercise and you get to socialize with a group of guys and girls who want to dance with girls and guys.
Can you try tracking happiness? Sure, why not. Have a prompt to record happiness appear at random intervals, or write a journal to note big highs or lows. Then questions like “do things like salsa increase my happiness more than things like video games” or whatever become addressable in a slightly more informed way.
I agree with you that your mind should not be on contrived proxy goals while you are salsa dancing. Better to be enjoying the salsa. But I disagree with the implication that because many metrics are tangential to the ‘true’ goal, careful measurement is flawed. It it still the fun/happiness that you care about, just now you are doing a smarter job of tracking it.
Can you try tracking happiness? Sure, why not. Have a prompt to record happiness appear at random intervals, or write a journal to note big highs or lows.
Actually I do, Most days I put down a number from the interval 0-100 to rate my happiness.
I don’t think that the number is informative when it comes to my Salsa dancing despite the fact that I’m someone who did Quantified Self TV interviews in Germany that involve showing me dancing Salsa.
The thing I found is that it’s important for me to drink water directly after arriving home from Salsa dancing. Otherwise I might lose up to one kg of body weight the next day from the missing water I sweated out.
But back to the topic. The fact that I do have some formal measurement shows me very well the limits of those measurements when it comes to making most decisions.
If one truly wanted to drop resources into optimizing salsa ability, I’d imagine filming the dance floor from a few cellphones every week, uploading the video to youtube and paying a few experts on a salsa forum to give the dancers a rating and feedback would give a somewhat valid metric that you could go about tracking, quantifying and optimizing.
If the goal is impressive dancing that wow’s spectators that might be a way to go. If your goal is to dance in way that your dance partner enjoys that’s not directly related to how it looks on video.
In your life, salsa dancing ability is definitely not the sole metric you wish to be optimizing for.
Things you presumably want to optimize might be something like personal happiness, bettering the world or wherever you find meaning.
If one truly wanted to drop resources into optimizing salsa ability, I’d imagine filming the dance floor from a few cellphones every week, uploading the video to youtube and paying a few experts on a salsa forum to give the dancers a rating and feedback would give a somewhat valid metric that you could go about tracking, quantifying and optimizing.
But I presume that that is not the primary goal of most salsa-goers. I guess that people go to salsa dancing nights because they are fun, good exercise and you get to socialize with a group of guys and girls who want to dance with girls and guys.
Can you try tracking happiness? Sure, why not. Have a prompt to record happiness appear at random intervals, or write a journal to note big highs or lows. Then questions like “do things like salsa increase my happiness more than things like video games” or whatever become addressable in a slightly more informed way.
I agree with you that your mind should not be on contrived proxy goals while you are salsa dancing. Better to be enjoying the salsa. But I disagree with the implication that because many metrics are tangential to the ‘true’ goal, careful measurement is flawed. It it still the fun/happiness that you care about, just now you are doing a smarter job of tracking it.
Actually I do, Most days I put down a number from the interval 0-100 to rate my happiness.
I don’t think that the number is informative when it comes to my Salsa dancing despite the fact that I’m someone who did Quantified Self TV interviews in Germany that involve showing me dancing Salsa. The thing I found is that it’s important for me to drink water directly after arriving home from Salsa dancing. Otherwise I might lose up to one kg of body weight the next day from the missing water I sweated out.
But back to the topic. The fact that I do have some formal measurement shows me very well the limits of those measurements when it comes to making most decisions.
If the goal is impressive dancing that wow’s spectators that might be a way to go. If your goal is to dance in way that your dance partner enjoys that’s not directly related to how it looks on video.