This is an overview of his self-experiments (to improve his mood and sleep, and to lose weight), with arguments that self-experimentation, especially on the brain, is remarkably effective in finding useful, implausible, low-cost improvements in quality of life, while institutional science is not.
There’s a lot about status and science (it took Roberts 10 years to start getting results, and it’s just to risky to careers for scientists to take on projects which last that long), and some intriguing theory at the end that activities can be classified into exploitation (low risk, low reward) and exploration (high risk, high reward), and that people aren’t apt to want to do exploration full time, so, if given a job that’s full-time exploration (like institutional science), they’ll turn most of it into exploitation.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of My Self-Exploration by Seth Roberts.
This is an overview of his self-experiments (to improve his mood and sleep, and to lose weight), with arguments that self-experimentation, especially on the brain, is remarkably effective in finding useful, implausible, low-cost improvements in quality of life, while institutional science is not.
There’s a lot about status and science (it took Roberts 10 years to start getting results, and it’s just to risky to careers for scientists to take on projects which last that long), and some intriguing theory at the end that activities can be classified into exploitation (low risk, low reward) and exploration (high risk, high reward), and that people aren’t apt to want to do exploration full time, so, if given a job that’s full-time exploration (like institutional science), they’ll turn most of it into exploitation.