At the Shangri-La Diet forums, SLDers — more than a hundred of them — have been posting their weight for many months, thanks to Rey Arbolay. No similar data is available for any other weight-loss method, as far as I know.
The main weakness of the SLD data is lack of comparison. This led me to propose web trials — a hybrid of the SLD data collection and a clinical trial, where there is always a comparison (at least two treatments, or treatment and control). After I interviewed Robin Hanson about them, a British student programmer named Andrew Sidwell contacted me and offered to set up a website to allow web trials to be done.
How exciting! A website that does web trials will allow cheap, easy, testing of many solutions to many problems. Although clinical trials usually involve medical problems, web trials can be used to study anything, as Robin pointed out. Andrew and I plan to start with procrastination.
That’s very exciting Seth! I’m glad things are rolling along well for you
If you start with procrastination it will take longer.
How are you planning on handling the case where what you’re tackling turns out to be two or more different conditions (that respond to different treatments)? I’m thinking that once you have good data on a few different treatments, and one or more of the treatments seems to have a multimodal distribution of efficacy, then you’d form hypotheses about different causes and have all the participants fill out custom-designed questionnaires to tease out the different causes. So for instance, for some people procrastination might be helped most by ADD meds, and for others it would be helped most by a change in life circumstances (because whatever they’re procrastinating about isn’t what they *really* want to do). So you see that ADD meds help a third of the people, and re-evaluating one’s goals helps another third, and you find that 90% of the first group answer “no” to a question about life goal dissatisfaction, and 90% of the second answer yes. Then you can use that question to better direct treatment.
How will this compare to RemedyFind?
Compared to RemedyFind: It will involve more types of measures. RemedyFind is based on efficacy ratings alone. And the comparisons will be more equal — e.g., will be collected at the same time. RemedyFind is a fascinating site, thanks for telling me about it.
How to handle the case where what you’re tackling turns out to be two or more different conditions: Yes, you would expect (a) a bimodal distribution of effectiveness and/or (b) that a person’s characteristics predict what will happen.