Over the past month, I have started taking melatonin supplements, instigated a new productivity system, implemented significant changes in diet and begun a new fitness routine. February is also a month where I anticipate changes in my mood. I find myself moderately depressed and highly irritable with no situational cause, and I have no idea which of these things, if any, are responsible.
This is not ideal.
I’d been considering breaking my calendar down into two-week blocks, and staging interventions in accordance with this. Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my shoulder and told me to turn it into an amazing web service that would let people assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts, where they’re algorithmically assigned to balanced blocks so that effects of overlapping interventions can be teased apart.
I’ve never really gotten that into the whole Quantified Self thing, but I’d be keen to see if something like this existed already. If not, I’d consider putting such a thing together.
Any discussion/observations on this general subject?
Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my shoulder and told me to turn it into an amazing web service that would let people assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts, where they’re algorithmically assigned to balanced blocks so that effects of overlapping interventions can be teased apart.
So it’s a web service that would spit out a random Latin square and then run ANOVA on the results for you?
I don’t think I’ve heard of such a thing. (Most people who would follow the balanced design and understand the results are already able to do it for themselves in R/Stata/SPSS etc.) Statwing.com might have something useful, they seemed to be headed in that direction of ‘making statistics easy’.
I was imagining a site that would look at all the different things you’re trying at the moment, look at all the things other people are trying, and give you a macro-schedule for starting them that works towards establishing cyclicality across all users.
It could also manage your micro-schedule, (prompt you to take a pill, do twenty sit-ups, squirt cold water in your right ear, etc.), ask for metrics and let users log salient information and observations. Come to think of it, once that infrastructure is already in place, there’s no reason you couldn’t open it up as a platform for more legitimate and formal trials.
Mm. So not just scheduling your own interventions but try to balance across users too… No, I don’t know of anything like that. CureTogether actually got some research published, but I don’t think randomization or balancing was involved. (And trying to get nootropics or self-help geeks to collectively do something is like trying to herd deaf cats into pushing wet spaghetti...)
When I found myself depressed and irritable on a diet, it seemed to be evidence that I was hungry. Is there any food or drink that you can try consuming to stave off that feeling, while still following the diet? As an example my diet allowed me to consume unlimited amounts of unprocessed fruit, so if I felt depressed and irritable, I could eat that until I felt better, and not hurt my diet at all.
I’ve ruled out hunger/low blood sugar as a simple causal factor. I imagine it’s a combination of factors, but I’m annoyed at myself for implementing so many changes at once and not being able to determine efficacy or side-effects as a result.
If you’ve ruled out hunger, is there anyone like a spouse, girlfriend, roomate, relative or coworker, who you meet regularly in person? I’ve found that they can often help you alleviate the symptoms and talk out this kind of problem to determine possible causes.
Exception: If they are themselves the cause of the problem, this may not be helpful.
This is somewhat trickier over the internet because we don’t know you as well, and we can’t pick up as easily on emotional cues. People who know you better are more likely to have access to background information to piece together things, and would be able to judge your reactions to proposed ideas better.
Yes, on looking at your original post again, I’m getting somewhat off track, sorry about that.
Trying to go back to your original topic, my experience with Quantified Self /Lifehacking style methods is quite limited and appears to have a notable correlative factor, which is social support. All of the lifehacking methods (I can think of two so far) that I used that were accompanied with support from other people currently appear to be working well. The one that I can think of that did not have the support of others didn’t. That being said, that isn’t much evidence.
If this is the case, than I would expect whether or not the people who assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts get to discuss their plans/implementations with other people in their cohorts would substantially affect the results (Unless you specifically had one cohort that allowed for discussion with other cohort members and one cohort that did not.)
As you seem to recognize in your reply to Gwern, this probably cannot function as a stand-alone feature, but needs to sit atop a Quantified Self platform. The minimal system is one that just keeps track of your data, while making data entry easier than existing systems. The next step is to figure out what things you’re tracking correspond to what things I’m tracking. This is difficult to combine with the flexibility of allowing the tracking of anything.
Why haven’t you gotten into the Quantified Self thing? At the very least, they probably have better answers to this question.
Quantified Self seems like one of those things you have to be into, and I’m just not that into it.
It seems to me that a lot of the QS-types take an almost recreational pleasure in what they’re doing. I understand that. I get a similar sort of pleasure from other things, but not this. I’d like the information, but there’s only so much effort I’m prepared to spend on getting it.
Over the past month, I have started taking melatonin supplements, instigated a new productivity system, implemented significant changes in diet and begun a new fitness routine. February is also a month where I anticipate changes in my mood. I find myself moderately depressed and highly irritable with no situational cause, and I have no idea which of these things, if any, are responsible.
This is not ideal.
I’d been considering breaking my calendar down into two-week blocks, and staging interventions in accordance with this. Then the restless spirit of Paul Graham sat on my shoulder and told me to turn it into an amazing web service that would let people assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts, where they’re algorithmically assigned to balanced blocks so that effects of overlapping interventions can be teased apart.
I’ve never really gotten that into the whole Quantified Self thing, but I’d be keen to see if something like this existed already. If not, I’d consider putting such a thing together.
Any discussion/observations on this general subject?
So it’s a web service that would spit out a random Latin square and then run ANOVA on the results for you?
I don’t think I’ve heard of such a thing. (Most people who would follow the balanced design and understand the results are already able to do it for themselves in R/Stata/SPSS etc.) Statwing.com might have something useful, they seemed to be headed in that direction of ‘making statistics easy’.
I was imagining a site that would look at all the different things you’re trying at the moment, look at all the things other people are trying, and give you a macro-schedule for starting them that works towards establishing cyclicality across all users.
It could also manage your micro-schedule, (prompt you to take a pill, do twenty sit-ups, squirt cold water in your right ear, etc.), ask for metrics and let users log salient information and observations. Come to think of it, once that infrastructure is already in place, there’s no reason you couldn’t open it up as a platform for more legitimate and formal trials.
Mm. So not just scheduling your own interventions but try to balance across users too… No, I don’t know of anything like that. CureTogether actually got some research published, but I don’t think randomization or balancing was involved. (And trying to get nootropics or self-help geeks to collectively do something is like trying to herd deaf cats into pushing wet spaghetti...)
When I found myself depressed and irritable on a diet, it seemed to be evidence that I was hungry. Is there any food or drink that you can try consuming to stave off that feeling, while still following the diet? As an example my diet allowed me to consume unlimited amounts of unprocessed fruit, so if I felt depressed and irritable, I could eat that until I felt better, and not hurt my diet at all.
I’ve ruled out hunger/low blood sugar as a simple causal factor. I imagine it’s a combination of factors, but I’m annoyed at myself for implementing so many changes at once and not being able to determine efficacy or side-effects as a result.
If you’ve ruled out hunger, is there anyone like a spouse, girlfriend, roomate, relative or coworker, who you meet regularly in person? I’ve found that they can often help you alleviate the symptoms and talk out this kind of problem to determine possible causes.
Exception: If they are themselves the cause of the problem, this may not be helpful.
This is somewhat trickier over the internet because we don’t know you as well, and we can’t pick up as easily on emotional cues. People who know you better are more likely to have access to background information to piece together things, and would be able to judge your reactions to proposed ideas better.
I appreciate your concern, though the point of this post was to solicit discussion of intervention management, not my emotional problems :-)
Yes, on looking at your original post again, I’m getting somewhat off track, sorry about that.
Trying to go back to your original topic, my experience with Quantified Self /Lifehacking style methods is quite limited and appears to have a notable correlative factor, which is social support. All of the lifehacking methods (I can think of two so far) that I used that were accompanied with support from other people currently appear to be working well. The one that I can think of that did not have the support of others didn’t. That being said, that isn’t much evidence.
If this is the case, than I would expect whether or not the people who assign themselves into self-experimental cohorts get to discuss their plans/implementations with other people in their cohorts would substantially affect the results (Unless you specifically had one cohort that allowed for discussion with other cohort members and one cohort that did not.)
As you seem to recognize in your reply to Gwern, this probably cannot function as a stand-alone feature, but needs to sit atop a Quantified Self platform. The minimal system is one that just keeps track of your data, while making data entry easier than existing systems. The next step is to figure out what things you’re tracking correspond to what things I’m tracking. This is difficult to combine with the flexibility of allowing the tracking of anything.
Why haven’t you gotten into the Quantified Self thing? At the very least, they probably have better answers to this question.
Quantified Self seems like one of those things you have to be into, and I’m just not that into it.
It seems to me that a lot of the QS-types take an almost recreational pleasure in what they’re doing. I understand that. I get a similar sort of pleasure from other things, but not this. I’d like the information, but there’s only so much effort I’m prepared to spend on getting it.