Something about your rough model disagrees with me (in addition to the stuff in gwern’s comment). Tentatively I’d put my finger on strategies like your hypothetical strategy A being rarer than they look. I think it’s uncommon for a prospective lifestyle change to simultaneously
have a much better chance than 50% of being worth implementing...
...yet not obviously be a good idea a priori
be something you’re not already doing
be easy for you and/or friends to test/implement
be non-obvious enough that published research on it doesn’t already exist
A half stick of butter every day makes you smarter—and in contrast to an equivalent amount of other saturated fats? That’s really rather surprising. I would like to see more research on that. Because it is kind of awesome.
Well obviously you have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether Real Science is necessary,
To be sure. I don’t think my line of argument should shut the door on self-experimentation. I’d just focus on low-risk, low-effort interventions as candidates. (Otherwise I’m likely to end up with more high-risk/high-effort false positives than I’d like.)
but the butter mind thing is looking pretty good
So it is! When I saw the original Seth Roberts blog post my reaction was to write it off as a probable fluke. The fact that it seems to replicate in a randomized trial with n = 45 makes me much more interested, especially as the relative speed-up from the butter remained at about 5% (suggesting Seth’s original result wasn’t just a high/low outlier). I’d have chosen a different experimental design, and I’ll have to take a look at the raw data to convince myself of the analysis, but it seems promising.
As for the Anki thing, I probably wouldn’t wait! It’s the sort of low-effort, low-risk intervention that’s best for self-experimentation.
Something about your rough model disagrees with me (in addition to the stuff in gwern’s comment). Tentatively I’d put my finger on strategies like your hypothetical strategy A being rarer than they look. I think it’s uncommon for a prospective lifestyle change to simultaneously
have a much better chance than 50% of being worth implementing...
...yet not obviously be a good idea a priori
be something you’re not already doing
be easy for you and/or friends to test/implement
be non-obvious enough that published research on it doesn’t already exist
(Edited to add “be” to bullet point 2.)
Well obviously you have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether Real Science is necessary, but the butter mind thing is looking pretty good:
http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-experiment/
Would you wait for a real study before trying this?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ba6/alternate_card_types_for_anki/
W. T. F! ?
A half stick of butter every day makes you smarter—and in contrast to an equivalent amount of other saturated fats? That’s really rather surprising. I would like to see more research on that. Because it is kind of awesome.
To be sure. I don’t think my line of argument should shut the door on self-experimentation. I’d just focus on low-risk, low-effort interventions as candidates. (Otherwise I’m likely to end up with more high-risk/high-effort false positives than I’d like.)
So it is! When I saw the original Seth Roberts blog post my reaction was to write it off as a probable fluke. The fact that it seems to replicate in a randomized trial with n = 45 makes me much more interested, especially as the relative speed-up from the butter remained at about 5% (suggesting Seth’s original result wasn’t just a high/low outlier). I’d have chosen a different experimental design, and I’ll have to take a look at the raw data to convince myself of the analysis, but it seems promising.
As for the Anki thing, I probably wouldn’t wait! It’s the sort of low-effort, low-risk intervention that’s best for self-experimentation.