My 16-month theanine self-experiment

For a community that prides itself on critical thinking, I'm always surprised to see HN lap this sort of pseudoscientific witch-doctor stuff up.

This poorly-controlled, N=1 experiment tells you nothing, not even about the author.

There's absolutely no reason to consider these novice self-experiments when professional scientific experiments are available (unless you're hunting for a specific result).

The author directly quoted the European Food Safety Authority, who found the same thing he did. There's a rich history of self-experimentation in medicine and nutrition, I don't think you need to be so negative.

It's the contrary. Science, see European Food Safety Authority and examine.com, shows lots of data that it doesn't work.

Yet people have been saying all over the internet it's working.

The burden of the proof is on those who claim the opposite of the vast majority of scientist studies.

Beside, N=1 studies is still better than some nobody on the internet claiming it works when he did nothing to negate the placebo effect.

Oh come on! Studies about supplements over time are almost always "poorly controlled" because you have to ask people to do something while living their lives.

Also, N=1 experiments can absolutely be interesting and give us ideas for further study, even if they don't say anything about a population.

Arent all humans different and therefore N=1 actually ok in this scenario??

Uh, I think the article itself is fine. Not the most rigorous science, but not too bad for an amateur.

But the comments on HN, on the other hand... Every single post about medicine or disease is full of anecdote upon anecdote and pseudoscience. It's really hard to tell the difference between HN and Reddit in this regard.

The most insane part is that people here are so eager to jump on the train and recommend random treatments to others when they've only vaguely described their problem. I never understand this.

My point was that no data gleaned from this experiment would've been meaningful, regardless of the result, because it was not conducted very rigourously.and on a sufficiently large scale.

People invented and discovered remarkable things before modern statistics and RCTs (work on puerperal fever, antisepsis and germ theory stand out for me). Humans can make surprising progress with only small scale experimentation and observation.

I prefer the results of large studies. I think modern methods are better than methods from the Scientific Revolution. But people can't always afford to wait a decade or two for solidly replicated results.