Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/fitness-tracker-cheating-is-bi.html
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It takes an Ant Financial user around 850,000 steps to plant one of the more expensive tree varieties on offer in Ordos, a desert city in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. “[The gadget] created several thousand steps in about an hour. Now I can finally plant trees without having to shake my phone all the time!” wrote one buyer in his Taobao review.
There is an entire cyberpunk novel in this paragraph, but it’s a really stupid one.
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10,000 Steps is a lot. I have trouble get 6,000 a day. I can’t imagine if my college would have required school work PLUS 10,000 steps a day. No wonder they cheat.
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I choose the golden retriever option.
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I am admittedly a sedentary person (I am old) - 4000 steps a day is average for me. I can bump it up to 6K+ by knitting for a couple of hours each evening in front of the tube. That cracks me up.
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So the Chinese are discovering the old adage of measures becoming targets that regulation-dodging financiers and teachers under NCLB assessment pressures have discovered. When you try to set up a specific measure of performance to get a sense for the larger picture, your subjects will inevitably turn that measure into a target and hyperfocus on gaming it.
ETA: I knew there was a name for it, but google failed me. Thanks @Purplecat!
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So the uni guy who was working his tuition off by carrying 300 cells at a time and running around with them loses out. Is that progress?
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Goodhart’s law in action.
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On some TV show a few years ago, one of the store owners attached a fitbit to automatic paint mixer, and got something like 40000 steps in a few minutes.
The closest I could find online
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It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of metrics.
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I use a step counter, but it’s function is to help me remember to get off my duff and away from the screen for my own benefit; to heck with what anyone else thinks. Our town has a park on its south end that features a 900’ hill with lots of walking, running, and dirt bike trails. It beats the heck out of grinding away on an elliptical or treadmill exercise machine. Plus the dogs really love getting out in the forest.
And speaking of dogs, that was cruel making the dog think he was going to go for a walk, and then not taking him out. Shame.
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I worked for a large Fortune 500 software company. They had a step fitness program. You could earn giftcards, swag, etc. Since it was a call center, people would openly bounce the pedometers on their knee all day while taking calls.
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10k really isn’t a lot.
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Different strokes, etc., but college is when I started regularly walking, although it was more for my brain* than for physical exercise (if anything, I was underweight then, if not exactly physically fit). I kept up the habit for years as long as I was in walking distance of a grocery store, restaurant, post office etc. Now that I don’t have anything like that in walking distance of home, I have to more or less remind myself to go on a walk.
*Listening to music; getting away from a noxious roommate etc.
I’ve found that, given I’m going to do some (if not dedicated) walking on any given day (to/from the parking lot, getting lunch, buying groceries, going to the terlet, etc.), I really have to sit on my ass to not get 7,000 steps in a day. I’ve made 12,000 my daily goal although I don’t hit it every day.
I have to imagine it would at least burn more calories than sitting still, if not as much as actually walking.
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Jesus, between this 10k step goal, the seasonal forced labour in the factories and the severely limited reading lists, how do students there get a useful education?
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Right after I moved back here, I wore a pedometer while moving my boxes from the garage to the house. I walked back and forth for 6 hours straight, but the pedometer recorded a tenth of my actual steps.
I once had a pudgy co-worker who tied her pedometer to her shoelaces and would jiggle her foot while sitting and playing on her phone. SHE TOTALLY FOOLED EVERYONE!
[sarcastically] We all suddenly thought she was buff.
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My 12 dollar Chinese smartwatch tells me I average 3000 steps a day during my commute to and from work and while working. That’s about 2 miles total.
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I cycle an hour to and from work. When I had a fitness tracker, it didn’t report any significant exercise during my commute so it probably didn’t detect any motion consistent with walking or running. I still got the exercise though. So yeah, data from fitness trackers may not be a good measure of how much exercise you are getting.
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The readout says that you ran 6.8 miles… on all fours?
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