At the CBC in Toronto, Sarah Kapoor, who did a story about the Shangri-La Diet, started what she called “the OJ group” — OJ meaning Ordinary Journalism. Journalism about ordinary life, like The Hunt.

Were formation of the OJ Group a chess move, I would give it two exclamation points. 1. It points out a major problem with standard journalism: Too much of it is about famous and powerful people doing boring things. 2. It gathers support. It is a way of persuading others and learning from them. 3. It criticizes by creating — as Michelangelo advised. My self-experimentation — about everyday concerns such as sleep, mood, and weight — might be called Ordinary Science. It is science about ordinary life using methods of ordinary life.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen argued that we care enormously about status display. The upper (leisure) classes display their status by conspicuously avoiding useful work (e.g., long fingernails) and by conspicuous waste (e.g., hood ornaments). Academics display status by avoiding work on useful questions. Such work is dismissed as “applied”, in contrast to “pure” research. The status of scientific work also depends on dimensions that Veblen doesn’t mention: 1. It is higher status to have someone else do something than to do it yourself. 2. Expensive research is higher status than cheap research. Thus my self-experimentation had three strikes against it: low-status topics, low-status participants (I’m not ordering anyone around), and low-status cost (cheap).

In journalism, like everywhere else, there is status by association. Writing about high-status people is higher status than writing about low-status people.

Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine—or outside medicine, for that matter—one should be a scientist in this world. In the simplest terms, this means one should count something. . . . The only requirement is that what you count should be interesting to you.

When I was a resident I began counting how often our surgical patients ended up with an instrument or sponge forgotten inside them. It didn’t happen often: about one in fifteen thousand operations, I discovered. But when it did, serious injury could result. One patient had a thirteen-inch retractor left in him that tore into his bowel and bladder. Another had a small sponge left in his brain that caused an abscess and a permanent seizure disorder. . . I found that the mishaps predominantly occurred in patients undergoing emergency operations or procedures that revealed the unexpected—such as a cancer when the surgeon had anticipated only appendicitis.

The numbers began to make sense. If nurses have to track fifty sponges and a couple of hundred instruments during an operation—already a tricky thing to do—it is understandably much harder under urgent circumstances or when unexpected changes require bringing in lots more equipment. Our usual approach of punishing people for failures wasn’t going to eliminate the problem, I realized. Only a technological solution would—and I soon found myself working with some colleagues to come up with a device that could automate the tracking of sponges and instruments.

From Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. Part of Gawande’s answer to the question: How to matter?

Thanks to Sean Curley.