When I was a grad student I was inspired to self-experiment by something I read about teaching math: The best way to learn is to do, said Paul Halmos, a math professor. A more recent version is fail early fail often fail cheap.
A maker of infomercials put it like this:
We were fortunate at American Telecast, in that most of our learning days were in our first 12 years, when we were in the 2-minute business. Learning was a lot cheaper. Failure was a lot cheaper than what failure is today in a 30-minute commercial. When you fail with a 30-minute commercial you can lose half a million or a million or a million and a half dollars. When we failed with a 2-minute commercial back then, we were failing with $15 or $20 thousand.
Self-experimentation made failure so cheap, so much cheaper than conventional research, that I was able to learn much more.
All this seems so obvious — yet self-experimentation by professional scientists is very rare. Psychology and nutrition professors, for example, could easily do self-experimentation, but don’t. And the infomercial maker describes himself as “fortunate” rather than as deliberately creating the situation.
halmos had at least half the right idea. sure, you can learn by doing, but you also have to have objective evaluation. that’s hard to do in teaching as it’s hard to get good information about what people are learning.
Such a way requires to leave the trotten paths. Once you do that, all hell or heaven can break loose. So most people stay in the herd.
I found out the herd is victim to plenty false dogma, so I left it regarding information consumption and thinking.
Maybe you are interested in today’s Disclosure Day:
https://sbeckow.wordpress.com
Be well.