I came across Laundry Tree while trying to figure out what soap nuts are. Soap nuts grow on trees and contain a soap. You can use them in place of laundry detergent. Something I read linked to the Laundry Tree site because it had a good picture.
I clicked around the site and was very impressed.
- Attractive web design. Easy to navigate.
- Neither hard nor soft sell. It’s plainly an e-tail site but it doesn’t hit you over the head with that nor does it hide it.
- Signs of life. Unlike, say, www.sethroberts.net, you can see that the home page has been updated recently.
- A friendly tone of voice.
- An interesting way to get visitors involved — a blogger’s contest (which this post will not enter me in).
- Persuasive.
And that’s just the website. None of the elements are rare yet the website itself stood way out from the zillions of websites I visit. I admire the whole business. It solves a real problem. It’s unusual. It’s very small. The owner puts little at risk, pays almost zero rent, and feels she’s making the world a better place in her own almost-unique way. Very few businesses manage to hit all of these marks.
I’m sure I would admire Laundry Tree no matter what I did with my life. Being a professor is very far from being a small business owner. But the self-experimentation I have done has a lot in common with Laundry Tree.
First, it began with trying to solve my own problems. I wanted to reduce acne, sleep better, lose weight. Laundry Tree began when the owner wanted a better way of doing laundry — no dyes, no harsh chemicals, not sudsy, and not expensive.
Second, it blends male and female tendencies. The data-analytic statistical-software number-crunching rigid-experiment side of self-experimentation is obviously male. The talk-about-my-problems side is obviously female. Likewise, Laundry Tree centers on a problem — choosing a good laundry detergent — that concerns women more than men. Yet constructing and maintaining a website is a kind of technical work that men seem to enjoy more than women. (Nowadays, I admit, it isn’t very technical.)
A journalist friend of mine was given an assignment to write about self-experimentation but eventually turned it down when he couldn’t find enough examples. I think the need to blend male and female tendencies is the main reason it is so rare. (At least publicly.) To get somewhere you really do have to make numerical measurements, enter the data, plot the data, and so on — stuff that, historically, men do far more than women. Yet to talk about your results you really do have to admit to everyone you have (or at least had) a problem, which men find much harder to do than women.
The Quantified Self Meetup group is having a meeting this Tuesday (Jan 27) — two days from now — at the UC Berkeley School of Information, 6 pm. The dozen or so projects I’ve heard about related to this group always invove quantification but rarely experimentation. In my experience quantification without experimentation doesn’t get very far but perhaps they will eventually learn this (or perhaps I’m wrong). Experimentation and quantification is more difficult than quantification alone but only a little more difficult. Perhaps the reason for lack of experimentation is that with quantification alone you stay safely on the male side of things but to add experimentation (to solve a personal problem) and talk about it you have to cross over to the female side.
That’s interesting–I tend to agree men are more analytical generally, and women more comfortable talking about problems. A possible explanation might be women point out problems they have and men try to solve them to impress women.
Women might be, perhaps not consciously, testing, so to speak, who would be the best mate, since it would be good for a woman’s evolutionary prospects to be selective, while men will perhaps tend to try to demonstrate their quality through clever solutions, but their main problem would be figuring out how to pass on their genes, from an evolutionary perspective, without much need for selectivity, since they can father man children and don’t need to devote resources to individual children the way mothers tend to need to, it seems.
I suppose men might be inclined to look for as many women with easy problems and low-standards as possible, and solve their problems to impress them and hopefully mate with them, whereas women might be looking for men who can solve tough problems and stick with them, to demonstrate their loyalty and provider abilities.
“Second, it blends male and female tendencies. The data-analytic statistical-software number-crunching rigid-experiment side of self-experimentation is obviously male. The talk-about-my-problems side is obviously female. Likewise, Laundry Tree centers on a problem — choosing a good laundry detergent — that concerns women more than men. Yet constructing and maintaining a website is a kind of technical work that men seem to enjoy more than women. (Nowadays, I admit, it isn’t very technical.)”
Goes along with my line of thinking! Unfortunately, they made me resign from Harvard for it.
Very interesting point, Seth. I have linked to this post and will add my thoughts to it in a post that will appear tomorrow morning on my blog.
Thanks, Justin. Here is a link:
https://wehrintheworld.blogspot.com/2009/01/seth-roberts-theory-for-why-self.html
I suppose Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project is support for my ideas here. She has the “admit a problem” part down really well but doesn’t do anything along the lines of quantification, plotting numbers, data analysis, etc.
No chemicals or unnatural substances are involved!
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They are 100%, totally natural. They are organically grown and are chemical-free,
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Not to pick on these folks, but this sort of false advertising: “Natural = good. Chemical = bad” is irritatingly never challenged.
Since the process of cleaning clothing isn’t wholly mechanical, we know that there has to be some chemical interaction involved. And lo, there it is:
The outer shell of the soapnut contains saponin, a natural substance known for its ability to cleanse and wash.
Interesting how saponin is a “natural substance”, not a natural “chemical” or even “chemical substance”.
Now, what bugs me is this insistence that something “natural” is inherently good and desirable. The oils from Toxicodendron radicans are certainly natural substances, but we generally try to avoid them, and would never wash our clothes with them.
“Natural” is subjective and does not mean “good” or “desirable”. Natural substances or chemicals are not any better or any worse than unnatural ones.