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It doesn't matter so much how accurate it is, as long as it's consistently inaccurate. I don't care if my scale at home is perfectly accurate. I care about kno
by RandallBrown 7y ago
It doesn't matter so much how accurate it is, as long as it's consistently inaccurate.
I don't care if my scale at home is perfectly accurate. I care about knowing that my weight is going up/down.
- dmix 7y agoAt 50-65% accuracy rates it’s pretty useless even for binary decision making (better/worse).
- pmiller2 7y agoI care if my scale at home is accurate. I don't want to know if my weight is going up or down, I want to know what I currently weigh so I can decide what I need to do about it.
- blackflame7000 7y agoCant you just use the mirror for that?
- warkdarrior 7y agoHard to use a mirror in your sleep.
- blackflame7000 7y agoUhh what? They were talking about weight
- mffnbs 7y agoIt's also difficult to weigh yourself with a mirror.
- ibeckermayer 7y agoYour mirror’s hard? Let me take a rain check on that, mine’s sleeping.
- rconti 7y agoYour example seems to disagree with your premise. If someone tells me I weigh "9239" this means nothing to me, unless in context of whether it's going up or down, and how it is related to others of my height (and age and gender, perhaps). I don't care that I weigh some multiple of an SI unit, or some fraction of a car. I care about my weight relative to others and my history.
- kuzimoto 7y agoIf you care about your weight relative to others, then it has to be accurate, no? Because how would you compare your weight unless you had a bunch of people using your scale.
- rconti 7y agoTrue, but given that it's more difficult to change your weight than it is to find someone of a different weight, I'd rather live my whole life with a scale that might be reading (say) 5lbs high or low, rather than a scale that fluctuates between 5lbs high or low from measurement to measurement.
- pmiller2 7y agoSure. Weight relative to 1 lb or 1kg is essentially the definition of “absolute weight.”
- pmiller2 7y agoNo, it does not. Say I'm 6' tall. "Normal" BMI is between 18.5 and 25, which translates to between 136.4 lbs - 184.3 lbs. Telling me my weight is going up or down tells me nothing about whether I fall into this healthy range. And, depending where I fall (below, within, or above the range), the actions I would wish to take differ. It's that simple. What instrument do you have that measures your "weight relative to others and your history"? Don't you only want to measure it relative to other healthy individuals? And, if you are particularly underweight or overweight, wouldn't you want to know when you're in the normal range? An instrument that only tells you what direction the change is doesn't tell you any of that.
- akiselev 7y agoHow would you even know if it is consistently inaccurate? The variability in biological signals might be so high day to day that it could be highly correlated but with frequent pathological cases that make the data useless.