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My 16-month theanine self-experiment

(dynomight.net)
817 points dynm | 1 comments | 09 Mar 25 03:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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mg ◴[09 Mar 25 08:26 UTC] No.43307263[source]▶
This is great. The author defines their own metrics, is doing their own A/B tests and publishes their interpretation plus the raw data. Imagine a world where all health blogging was like that.

Personally, I have not published any results yet, but I have been doing this type of experiments for 4 years now. And collected 48874 data points so far. I built a simple system to do it in Vim:

https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking

I also built a bunch of tooling to analyze the data.

I think that mankind could greatly benefit from more people doing randomized studies on their own. Especially if we find a way to collectively interpret the data.

So I really applaud the author for conducting this and especially for providing the raw data.

Reading through the article and the comments here on HN, I wish there was more focus on the interpretation of the experiment. Pretty much all comments here seem to be anecdotal.

Let's look at the author's interpretation. Personally, I find that part a bit short.

They calculated 4 p-values and write:

    Technically, I did find two significant results.
I wonder what "Technically" means here. Are there "significant results" that are "better" than just "technically significant results"?

Then they continue:

    Of course, I don’t think this
    means I’ve proven theanine is harmful.
So what does it mean? What was the goal of collecting the data? What would the interpretation have been if the data would show a significant positive effect of Theanine?

It's great that they offer the raw data. I look forward to taking a look at it later today.

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1. angg ◴[16 Mar 25 16:50 UTC] No.43380374[source]▶
> https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking

Loved reading this as I have been on a similar self tracking journey of my own.

I am curious about your thoughts on mobile support? Specifically, have you implemented anything to make adding/editing events while away from your computer easier? Or perhaps you feel it is not important for your use case?

Personally, I've found that being able to log an event in an instant, or just on a whim, is invaluable for capturing the sort of data I care about tracking the most (like what I just ate or my mood), and I find too much friction causes many events simply go unlogged as they almost always feel too unimportant or mundane in retrospect to keep a mental note of and track later.

I started out with a text file system similar to yours but I've since begrudgingly resorted to google forms for most of my tracking needs. It's nice that I can arbitrarily add and remove fields while still keeping everything relatively structured and parseable, and it does have (albeit inferior) revision history. But I dislike not having ownership and control over where my data is stored and absolutely *dread* waiting for the form to load every time I want to log an event, especially on mobile.