Summary Response Week 5: Self Experimentation

CPSC 601.25 Week 5 Response Part 1

Papers

In this response I will discuss one paper and one newspaper article, in which personal informatics and self experimentation are discussed.

Self Experimentation

The history of self experimentation in science long. Newtown formulated his theory of optics after painful experiments on his own eyes. More recently Barry Marshal won the Nobel prize for discovering the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers. He confirmed this result by drinking a test tube full of the bacteria and a year later, developed stomach ulcers himself. But self experimentation today is less common, science proceeds on a huge scale now, using defined and formulated methods. Researchers try to separate themselves, the subject, from what they study, the object. But this paper suggests that self experimentation is in fact more effective then traditional science which is a bold claim.

Claims

The author rests his claim on comparing his professional, peer reviewed research to his privately conducted self experimentation. Some of the reasons he poses for this are interesting and rational, such as how the incentive structure of academics forces plodding, low risk work to guarantee tenure. But other arguments, those of which take up the bulk of the paper, suggest that professors affect a faux aristocratic air by purposely conducting research that is useless - in the way that the idle rich might learn about yachting and fencing. This argument is much less convincing, since funding and grants follow researchers who produce results. The claim is then extended even more grandly into a 'theory of scientific progress', which involves power laws and log scaled measurements of 'scientific progress'. Here the author seems disturbingly comfortable quantifying things that are not quantifiable.

What can we salvage from this? That scientific research is weighed down by incentives for professors, ethics hassles and too much work validating timid hypothesis then bolding proposing new ones and then pursuing their falsification. That self experimentation succeeds when it frees researchers from these shackles, letting them generate interesting new hypothesis.

Validity & Science

But for people familiar with the philosophy of science, that is where the new theory of science must end. Science consists not in validating narrow theories but in falsifying broad, rich theories, the construction of which is half the work of good science. A self experimenter might propose many interesting hypothesis from their small scale tests, but these must be subjected to control groups and all the usual rigor afterwards.

Self Experimentation & Wider Personal Informatics

The second paper summarizes for a newspaper article the general trends in personal informatics. Starting with a few "ultrageeks" who recorded everything aspect of their lives, then moving slowly into the mainstream with techniques for tracking sleep and time and then finally large, well funded, mainstream tools like Mint and Nike+. The author briefly touches on self experimentation and discusses a women who tested tryptophan on herself to cure insomnia and improve focus. He suggests that this is a different sort of personal science, whose theories only reference a single person, an interesting idea that isn't given enough time or space. The author paints and interesting picture of a future where PI has gone mainstream, and personal tracking extended to many more variables, improving peoples health and letting them "self actualize" by more fulling living life ... through their refreshed memories. But more interesting then self actualizes quantified selfers, is all the data that this will produce and how much more easily researchers, if employing these tools, could validate and test hypothesis. That might be the actual, interesting, impact of PI.