The success of my self-experimentation has puzzled me. The individual discoveries (a new way to lose weight, a new way to improve mood, sleep-related stuff, the fast effects of omega-3) seem normal; someone would have found them. It’s their combination that’s strange. Scientists who study weight control do not discover anything about mood, for example. But I did.
An ancient (2001) essay by Paul Graham is about how the future lies with web-based applications. No more Microsoft Word. One of Graham’s stories sheds light on my puzzle:
I studied click trails of people taking the test drive [of Graham’s web-based application] and found that at a certain step they would get confused and click on the browser’s Back button. . . . So I added a message at that point, telling users that they were nearly finished, and reminding them not to click on the Back button. , . . The number of people completing the test drive rose immediately from 60% to 90%. . . . Our revenue growth increased by 50%, just from that change.
I studied click trails. He examined a rich data set, looking for hypotheses to test. I practiced what I’ll call spider science: I waited for something to happen. When it did, I started to study it, just as a spider moves to the part of the web with the fly. Here are examples:
1. A change in what I ate for breakfast caused me to wake up early much more often. I did many little experiments to find out why.
2. Watching TV early one morning seemed to have improved my mood the next day. This led to a lot of research to figure out why and how to control the effect.
3. After I started to stand more, my sleep improved. I made many measurements to see if this was cause and effect and if so what the function looked like (the function relating hours of standing to sleep improvement).
4. In Paris I lost my appetite. This started the research that led to the Shangri-La Diet.
5. The morning after I took some omega-3 capsules, my balance improved. This led to experiments to see if it was cause and effect and if so what the function (balance vs. amount of omega-3) looked like.
6. One day I took flaxseed oil at an unusual time. My mental scores suddenly improved. I started to study these short-term effects.
7. While studying these short-term effects, I noticed improvements shortly after exercise. I started to study the effect of exercise.
Graham studied click trails partly because he could so easily act on anything he learned, partly because it was his company and he was so committed to its success. The seven examples I have given all came about partly because I could easily act on what I noticed and partly because I would directly benefit from learning more.
Conventional scientists do not practice spider science. They do not continuously monitor or search out large rich data sets hoping to find something they can act on. They can’t afford to, it’s unconventional, it’s too risky, it won’t pay off soon enough, they probably couldn’t act on what they found, etc. Later in Graham’s essay he marvels that big companies develop any software at all. Microsoft is like “a mountain that can walk.” Likewise, I’m impressed that scientists operating under the usual constraints manage to discover anything. You might think tenure allows them to relax, wait, take chances, and do things they weren’t trained to do, but it doesn’t work out that way.
Seth,
You mentioned a drink in Paris that got your taste twisted, do you recall if it was Orangina ? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangina ). The Coke tastes different as well.
I need to write something longer on this, but there is some type of wisdom that says the french are thinner or at the very least they seem to be less weighty on average. While one can definitely see lifestyle differences in particular with regards to the use of cars as opposed to a more pedestrian approach to moving (hence letting french people to be standing longer over a whole day), I was wondering if another aspect of the french lifestyle could also be part of that equation: food. The large choice in the number of sauces and other cooking techniques could be one of the ways to diversify the taste of different mixtures to the point where the taste association, which you refer to, is altered.
Igor.
I sort of agree that whole “fields” practice something like waiting. But what happens when something is found? Does that shift the research of the person who found it? I don’t know enough about political science to know the answer.
True, most scientists don’t have tenure, making it even harder for them to wait.
The Paris drink wasn’t Orangina. Orangina is available in Berkeley. The Paris drinks I tried I had never seen before.
I agree that the diversity of French cooking helps them be thin.
You’re wrong. Scientists are willing to admit strange data. It’s unlikely they will do so without at least an attempted explanation, but you can’t afford to pass up new ideas when a completely independent experiment takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up. You build it, you make a bunch of measurements along the way to make sure you’re really studying what you think you are, and you finally get the ones you wanted to publish. Or you have to work another 6 months refining your device.
Maybe the real difference is that you’re dealing with systems which are innately complex, and hard to isolate. You can’t recreate a Mr. Seth every morning in exactly the same state to repeat the experiment. I use perfect crystals. This is also what makes me so skeptical about any significance in your results. If you find the tiniest thing prompts a new approach, how can you be sure it isn’t something else confounding your results? I guess you can only hope Omega-3 is a helluva powerful effect.