It’s not about a positive result meaning something will “assuredly work for you”. Only a Sith deals in absolutes. It’s about cost-benefit analysis.
To give an example, no reasonable person would self-experiment to see if cyanide cures their rash. Although there’s a distant probability your body has some wildly unusual reaction to cyanide in which it cures rashes, it’s much more likely that cyanide will kill you, the same way it kills everyone else. Although it might be worth a shot if cyanide had no downside, we have very strong evidence that on average it has a very large downside.
The same is true of HRT. People were using it to improve their cardiovascular health. We found that, on average, it decreases cardiovascular health. You can still try using it on the grounds that it might paradoxically increase yours, but on average, you will lose utility.
Consider the analogy to a lottery. You have different numbers than everyone else does. Just because someone else lost the lottery with their numbers, doesn’t mean you will lose the lottery with your numbers. But if we study all lottery participants for ten years and find that on average they lose money, then unless you have a specific reason to think your numbers are better than everyone else’s (not just different), you should expect to lose money too.
Now things would be different with a treatment with no downside (like eating a lot of some kind of food, or taking a safe and cheap supplement) - as long as you don’t mind the loss of time and money you can experiment all you want with those (though I still think you’d have trouble with bias and privileging the hypothesis, and that a rational person wouldn’t find a lot of these harmless self-experiments worth the time and the money at all). And things would be different if the potential benefit and potential harm had different levels of utility for you: for example, if you wanted to cure your joint pain so badly you didn’t mind risking heart attack as a side effect. I think this is what you’re aiming at in your post above, and for those cases, I agree with you.
But when you’re taking a treatment like HRT which is intended to prevent heart attacks, but actually on average increases heart attacks, then shut up and multiply.
Also, don’t call it “self-experimentation” when you’re talking about preventing cardiovascular disease, since you never end up with any usable self-data (as opposed to, say, self-experimenting with medication for joint pain, where you might get a strong result of your joint pain disappearing that you can trace with some confidence to the medication). Call it what it is—gambling.
It’s not about a positive result meaning something will “assuredly work for you”. Only a Sith deals in absolutes. It’s about cost-benefit analysis.
To give an example, no reasonable person would self-experiment to see if cyanide cures their rash. Although there’s a distant probability your body has some wildly unusual reaction to cyanide in which it cures rashes, it’s much more likely that cyanide will kill you, the same way it kills everyone else. Although it might be worth a shot if cyanide had no downside, we have very strong evidence that on average it has a very large downside.
The same is true of HRT. People were using it to improve their cardiovascular health. We found that, on average, it decreases cardiovascular health. You can still try using it on the grounds that it might paradoxically increase yours, but on average, you will lose utility.
Consider the analogy to a lottery. You have different numbers than everyone else does. Just because someone else lost the lottery with their numbers, doesn’t mean you will lose the lottery with your numbers. But if we study all lottery participants for ten years and find that on average they lose money, then unless you have a specific reason to think your numbers are better than everyone else’s (not just different), you should expect to lose money too.
Now things would be different with a treatment with no downside (like eating a lot of some kind of food, or taking a safe and cheap supplement) - as long as you don’t mind the loss of time and money you can experiment all you want with those (though I still think you’d have trouble with bias and privileging the hypothesis, and that a rational person wouldn’t find a lot of these harmless self-experiments worth the time and the money at all). And things would be different if the potential benefit and potential harm had different levels of utility for you: for example, if you wanted to cure your joint pain so badly you didn’t mind risking heart attack as a side effect. I think this is what you’re aiming at in your post above, and for those cases, I agree with you.
But when you’re taking a treatment like HRT which is intended to prevent heart attacks, but actually on average increases heart attacks, then shut up and multiply.
Also, don’t call it “self-experimentation” when you’re talking about preventing cardiovascular disease, since you never end up with any usable self-data (as opposed to, say, self-experimenting with medication for joint pain, where you might get a strong result of your joint pain disappearing that you can trace with some confidence to the medication). Call it what it is—gambling.