On Tuesday (January 9) I am giving a talk about my self-experimentation to a group of interface designers who I hope will be interested in the broad methodological conclusions to be drawn from it. An audio file of the talk and the PowerPoint will be available but I think the most interesting stuff will be clearer and more accessible if I write it down. So here it is.
Usually we learn from our mistakes. This is the rare case where I learned from success — I expected my self-experimentation — to improve my sleep, to find effective ways to lose weight — to fail and was surprised and impressed when I was wrong. The seven lessons that follows (divided into four posts) are the broad conclusions I draw from what happened.
1. Do something. I started the long-term self-experimentation that led to my paper because I didn’t want to wake up too early for the rest of my life. I expected my little self-experiments to fail, and they did fail, but I didn’t realize that I would slowly learn from failure. I learned how to record my data, for instance, and how to analyze it. The effect of that learning was that my self-experimentation got better and better and after many years of failure I got somewhere. I think American culture teaches that success is good and failure bad, but the truth for scientists is that failure is good in the sense that you learn from your mistakes.
2. Keep doing something. I learned the value of drudgery. The research took many years. After my initial failures I continued not because I could see I was learning stuff — the learning was too slow to be perceptible — but for the same reason I started: I didn’t want to wake up early for the rest of my life. One of my students had been a classical musician. She said that her job had been athletic, not aesthetic. It involved great repetition of the same movements, like manual labor. Likewise, scientists often see science as something intellectually wonderful. I came to see it differently. Perhaps a question has one answer and there are 100 plausible alternatives. To find the answer you may just need to test each of the 100 possibilities. No way around it. That was roughly the position I was in trying to improve my sleep: There were many possibilities and no alternative to simply testing them one by one. (More complex experimental designs, such as factorial designs, were impractical.) There was nothing intellectually wonderful about it. “One thing nobody tells you about being a postdoc is that stuff that used to be fun for its own sake becomes tedious when you’ve done it hundreds or thousands of times,” blogged a postdoc.
Part 2 is here.
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