Response to The Unreasonable Effectiveness of my Self-Experimentation

Summary

Seth Roberts outlines why self-experimentation can yield results that are better than the results from traditional scientific methods. The paper focuses both on the points in his self-experimentation where he was able to find good results to otherwise elusive problems (although the results themselves are not discussed particularly discussed). While the paper ranges on topics relating to the quality, sources and the social factors of research, the main point (for us at least) is how the personal tracking and personal informatics helped the research.

In particular the author mentions, in the formulation of his theory of the power relation of scientific research, how keeping records of every night's sleep were critical to determining what factors were important waking early. That even though the bulk of the records were not very meaningful (or at least were very consistent) having them available is still important to the process.

Discussion

In terms of personal informatics there seems to be two main points. As in our previous discussions the reflections from personal informatics still rely on collecting as much information as possible for as long as possible. Secondly here the personal informatics are not used directly for reflection, but are mostly used as  support to investigate hypotheses. In this case the apriori collection is the most important aspect of the pi systems used.