Garmin’s Relationship With Error
I saw a presentation on the “Strava tax” recently, about how a company is able to own the error in their work. But it got me thinking about Garmin, who seem to treat error very differently.
They claim to be striving for the most accurate sensors, and they are pretty good. But then they keep working to abstract all that data into something almost meaningless.
If I get a sleep score of 78, what does that actually mean? What did they sense to get that? The same goes for their Firstbeat analytics. How much error is in their race prediction? Can we ever properly predict a race? Or VO2 max, which normally requires me to wear a mask.
So instead of owning their error, Garmin seems to hide it away and front these abstractions instead, where we don’t know the algorithm and can’t really question the result.
And since I can’t test whether I had a 78 or an 82 sleep score, I can never really hold those stats accountable.