They might be looking for results that can be detected, but only by subjective, noisy measures.

You know, questions like "Am I enjoying a good life with my family?" and "Will I look back on this with pride in the future?" and stuff like that.

You can journal those things and use sentiment analysis to detect if you're moving in the right direction.

But you're more likely to succeed in those goals if you stop worrying about stuff like that and just get on with enjoying your short time in this world.

I have seen no evidence to support that assertion.

Life is short relative to what? You will only experience one life, so to you, life is both infinitely long and only a brief moment. Life is what you make it; so you should make the most of it by applying scientific rigor to maximizing what is important to you.

You might enjoy Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards, which rigorously explores the demotivational and anti-creative effects of scoring things. https://amzn.com/B01K0RH8L6

I can't tell if this is in earnest or sarcastic.

Sentiment analysis as a rigorous process exists to help machines that do not possess natural emotion processing to understand human sentiments. If you are the one having your own sentiments, why would you offload that to a machine? Unless you have a broken emotional processing center yourself, but in that case I doubt you could record meaningful sentiments either.

I thought it was a pretty good joke poking fun at the software-engineers-with-Asperger’s stereotype. If it wasn’t intended that way, even more hilarious. :-D

I thought it was a joke at first too, but their other comments seem to indicate they either really likes sticking to their comedy context, or they were serious.

Hah. Everything needs to be data or an algorithm these days. Sentiment analysis of journal entries, oh boy...

As I say, subjective noisy measures.

But he turned your subjective measure into an objective one.

Iff your writing style is well aligned with the SA model. Sentiment analysis has always been a bit dodgy for individuals, but it mostly works due to sheer numbers.

Sarcasm, for example, works very poorly with SA, and if you tend to write sarcastic prose, SA will be a waste of time at best, and counter productive at worst.

He said he'd take a subjective measure - a journal - and take objective measurements of that subjective measure.

I would say that's still a subjective measure; it sounds like you disagree?

I would disagree.

“I love these chips” is subjective. Rate-of-saying “I love (.)!” is objective.

The absolute rate may or may not be important (I’d guess low importance), but changes* to the rate can indicate that a life changing event had a much larger impact than one may be subjectively conscious of, especially if the change was gradual — a loved one becoming gradually more ill or more emotionally distant, for example, slowly enough that one does not realise that light and joy has begun to leave one’s life until after the recycling bin overflows with beer bottles.

If I'm trying to make myself happier, and I measure how many times I tweet smiling emojis vs frowning emojis, I can simply stop tweeting frowning emojis. Thus the metric is improved without any change in the underlying thing being measured.

An objective measure, like weight or hours of sleep or time to run 5km doesn't have this property.

It’s possible to cheat, but (1) why bother? You’d only be cheating yourself; (2) how do you know to cheat if depression has snuck up behind you, and that sneaking is what you want to be automatically alerted to because depression doesn’t tell you it’s depression it tells you that you suck and it’s all your fault and you deserve it.

> how do you know when you succeed.

Not everything is a competition.

Neither is all success. My mother has Alzheimer’s, I look after her, and I count any interaction as “successful” if both she and I are smiling afterwards.