What are some good unit, integration, performance tests for human beings?

1 points by dtjohnnyb 4 years ago | 1 comment

I've recently become interested in small tests we can perform to evaluate if aspects of our lives are performing below the recommended levels for a long and happy existence.

What prompted this was I started training for a triathlon and thought of myself as a healthy, fit person, able to run a 5k at a decent pace. However, I've been amazed to find out how much my aerobic fitness has cratered over the last couple years of working at home (no more cycling to work) and I'm unable to train for the required 3-4 hours per week at low intensities because I'm so aerobically unfit and muscularly weak. I see this as me passing a unit test (able to run 5k at intensity) but failing an integration/performance test (unable to string together long periods of training). Bringing this into sharper focus is that I've learned that this exact amount of training (3-4 hours of zone 2 training per week according to Peter Attia) is the recommended dose of exercise for a long health span, making me wonder what other aspects of my life are quietly failing due to me not having a test and benchmark to measure against.

Would love to hear of various objectiv-ish ways to evaluate a person's abilities in important aspects of life: fitness/health/strength, finances, mental health, relationships. I'm not looking for 100% test coverage here, this is merely an attempt to catalogue the important parts of our life and the ways to observe them over the long term.

salawat 4 years ago |

So I'm going to stop you right there, because before you go down that route, you need to realize that what makes computer program testing both feasible and worthwhile is the execution speed of digital logic.

Testing of human beings is to computers as testing on responses by plants is to humans. I.e., you can change something about a plants environment, and it will take hours to days for the effects to become apparent; in short two completely different timescales. In fact, you could very easily consume most of your day examining yourself thoroughly.

Also, I assure you, you will never implement a human unit test without running into very dicey ethical and logistics problems. You're pretty much at integration level by default. Which means your controls are non-trivial, and likely highly disruptive to establish.

That being said:

For workouts: -Reps @ resistance in unit time -Activity intensity for unit time For mentation: -Repetitive/similar task done in unit time -Error detection over unit time. -Context switches before self awareness of error state breaks down. -Reflex time

Basically, your getting into the realm of medical and psychological assessment. It is a realm I generally refuse to further the State of the Art in, as most human quantification efforts are inevitably doomed to get into what I deem to be morally fraught territory, as it is just far too tempting for those in positions of authority/power or aspiring to such to abuse any such system as soon as it is characterized.

Is there positive utility in niche situations? Yes. Is that enough to get such measures off my "Things I Won't Work With" list? No.