Your life in data: Is it all about events and properties?

[cross-posted from Quantified Self]

I'm designing the data layer for my site, and it's got me thinking about the essentials of what it is exactly that we track when self-experimenting. Putting on my ontologist's hat I've come up with two kinds of things that I think cover anything a human would want to track (I might as well be provocative here), and I'd love to get your feedback on how well it makes sense. I'm excited to ask the question here because, frankly, I'm not sure who else would understand it. Here goes. It seems to me that all things measurable can be reduced to events and properties. (These are inspired by methods and attributes in object-oriented programming.) Events are things we do, like "ran 2-1/2 hours," "took 81 mg of aspirin," or "forced myself to laugh." They answer the question about the past, "What did you do?" Properties, on the other hand, capture some aspect of a thing at a particular moment, such as "the number of pimples on my face," "my location," or "whether it's raining." They answer the question about the present, "What is the state of the thing right now?" (An aside: If those two cover past and present, what role does the future play in this context? I wonder if it is theory, given its utility in prediction.) Let me give you an example. I'm currently experimenting with ways to reduce tooth pain (I'm a grinder), and I've tested a number of possible causes so far - sugar, acidic foods, airflow, food temperature, and (as of this moment) daytime grinding. Each of these has events I care about: "ate ice cream," "mountain biked," and "inserted/removed night guard." There's only one corresponding property I'm tracking, "amount of pain in tooth 24." Properties and events.

Another example is if you want to test the relationship between your happiness and sunny weather. In this case the event might be "exposed myself to sunshine," and the property would be "my happiness." The reason this scheme seems reasonable to me is because of the nature of scientific inquiry. The way I think of how we experiment is that we: 1) think about some aspect of our lives we want to explore, 2) dream up something small we can change, 3) do it while collecting measurements, and then 4) analyze that data to decide what effects the changes had. Notice that there are two things at play in #3: Actions that I take (or things that happen around me), and measurements. Viola - events and properties! Unfortunately, the word "measurements" in the last bit causes a problem. To me, measurement answers the question, "How much of it?", and that applies to both events and properties. If we take the events in my bruxism experiment, what I want to know about them is a) how many hours I biked, and b) how many hours I wore the night guard before going to bed. Obviously I can measure these. For properties, what's interesting is that, unlike in experiments, the measurements are intrinsic; all you can really do is ask how much of a property there is. (I haven't nailed this down, but I think this dichotomy results from the existence of events being of value. That is, we're primarily interested that they occurred at all. The quantity of them may or may not be useful. For example, I might not care how much I rode my bike, but simply whether I rode at all today.) So there you have it. I'm really curious:

• What do you think of this analysis?
• Would typical self-experimenters (if there is such a person) get it?
• If you were designing an experiment, would thinking about measurements in this way help you?
• How do existing tools chop the world up? In particular I'm not sure I've seen properties explicitly identified. (Note: I've listed the multi-purpose tools I know about in my answer to What are some alternatives to Daytum?)

[Image from bartmaguire] (Matt is a terminally-curious ex-NASA engineer and avid self-experimenter. His projects include developing the Think, Try, Learn philosophy, creating the Edison experimenter's journal, and writing at his blog, The Experiment-Driven Life. Give him a holler at matt@matthewcornell.org)

Seth Roberts and Self-Experimenting: Thoughts on his excerpt in 'The 4-Hour Body'

I've been following Seth Roberts for some time. He's been a self-experimenter for many years, and applies his psychology experience research to testing all kinds of things out on himself, primarily health-related. He came to light recently in Tim Ferriss's post The Value of Self-Experimentation where he shares Seth's excerpt from Tim's understated The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. If you look at Roberts' work, especially his The Shangri-La Diet ("The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight-Loss Plan") you'll see how they might be kindered spirits.

Roberts' excerpt is an excellent introduction to self experimentation. Overall it gives a history of his fascinating experiments, argues that self-experimentation plays an important role that larger studies can't play, and explains the factors (financial and political) that cause ineffective treatments to be promoted, or vice versa. Below I list a few notes and comments about his piece, but I encourage you to read it yourself. If you want more of him you can watch Seth's video Stop worrying and start experimenting! over at the Quantified Self. I've listed more Seth-related links below [1].

Enjoy!

From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don't know.

I love this attitude, though I think it can take time to cultivate the idea of having power to try things out on your own, in spite of expert advice, such as your doctor's advice.

After several years, I ran out of things to try. All my ideas about what might help had proved wrong.

This shows that experiments often require perseverance. As I tried to explain in Variables, human bodies are complex, and it can take time both for results to manifest, and for us to figure out what's going on.

For unrelated reasons, I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit. A few days later, I started waking up too early every morning instead of half the time.

Roberts' creativity for coming up with surprising things to try is uncanny. Standing on one leg; fruit for breakfast; eating butter and testing math ability. It argues for trying lots of things. A question I have is can we learn or get inspiration for what to try?

To make sure the correlation reflected causality, I went back and forth between fruit and oatmeal. The results showed it was cause and effect. Fruit for breakfast caused more early awakening than oatmeal for breakfast.

In email conversations with Seth I've learned that the usual name in psychology for this type of back and forth process is "ABA designs" or "ABA-type designs" (see the Reversal or ABA designs section of the Wikipedia article, Single-subject research). As I understand it, this is the fundamental method for single-subject experiments. The only other design type I've heard of is a kind of "parallel" one (rather than serial ABA types) that takes advantage of our bilateral symmetry by trying different treatments on left and right sides at the same time. I'm told this is called a "blocking experiment." For example, a friend used this to test different treatments for a bout of poison ivy. I recently used this to test different cold weather clothing for mountain biking (different footwear on left and right sides).

Roberts describes three uses for self-experimentation: To test ideas, generate new ideas, and to develop ideas. I like that he highlights the role of surprise in coming up with new ideas, such as when he accidentally tried to put shoes on standing up and found his balance was improved. (You might like my post One way to enjoy the ride - celebrate surprise!)

the fact that we monitor ourselves in a hundred ways, makes it easy for self-experimentation to reveal unexpected side effects

Implicit in Roberts' work is that he is measuring many variables at once. For me this takes a lot of effort and diligence, which limits how many experiments I feel able to run concurrently. This makes me think about the role of Miller's Law of Requisite Parsimony which "asserts that human beings can only deal simultaneously with between five and nine observations at one time" (from the PDF Engaging in a Dialogue Game by Alexander Christakis).

Accidental discoveries cannot be placebo effects.

This insight comes from Roberts' response to critiques about self experiments not being "blind." I simply love it.

He lists three advantages of self-experimentation over conventional research done by experts: More power (faster, cheaper, and more wisdom via mistakes), stone age-like treatments (simple environmental changes) are easy to test, and better motivation.

Always do the minimum - the simplest, easiest experiment that will make progress.

The ideas of doing something fast and cheap, and designing it to fail quickly are hallmarks of making good prototypes that are essential to efficiently testing out new ideas with a minimum of effort and investment. (More on what constitutes "good failures" at How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows.)

Fear of loss of job, grant, or status also makes it hard for professional scientists to propose radical new ideas. Self-experimenters, trying to solve their own problem on their own time, are not trapped like this.

This makes me wonder how we can apply self-experimentation to innovation. What would the rules be? Involve non-experts? Try things that have already been "proven" to not work? How these relate to skunkworks projects?

Because they had total freedom and plenty of time ... [non-professionals] were able to use the accumulated knowledge of their time better

This brings the question about whether self-experimentation is accessible only to the privileged, such as us. This comment on my post Is There a Self-Experimentation Gender Gap? describes how the commenter has to remind herself what she takes for granted, including that she has "the privilege of time and space to think about these things." I think the tools and technology may be out of reach to most people, but the experimental mindset - that should be reachable for anyone. This is why I'm focusing on the philosophy first, along with the tools.

[1] Some Seth Roberts resources:

• His blog
• Scientific American articles Self-Experimenters Step Up for Science and Self-Experimenter Freed Himself from Insomnia, Acne and Love Handles
• The Boing Boing article Seth Roberts' fascinating self-experiments
• The MetaFilter entry Self Experimentation is Credible Science??
• A little on the controversy around self-experimenting: Learning from self-experimentation - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

"An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature."

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and other papers, 1949

2011-01-04: They did WHAT?

Quick links from the past week of experiments in the World Wide Lab

Study: Living Near a Highway May Contribute to Autism Risk. I always wonder why people live near major roads, and my main conclusion is for convenience or affordability. I'm biased by loving in-town life.

Brigada Creativa Shop - Life Calendar: How was your day?: In the high-tech self-tracking world (the Quantified Self aspect of Think, Try, Learn), I think there's a definite role for this retro recording tool. Pattern recognition would be hard, though.

The Smartest Way To Find a New Job On Google: A brilliant experiment where a Alec Brownstein found a job in advertising by making ads that showed up as the first result when several big New York creative directors Googled themselves. He got interviews with nearly all of them, and a job. Total cost to him: $6.

Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future: An ESP experiment by a famous psychology professor that suggests that "ordinary people ... can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet." The PDF article is here, with some critical responses from my hereos (The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) here. Makes you wonder why it took so long to find evidence for. Maybe multitasking has some benefits after all!

Families living an experiment in sustainability: An effort to create a "sharestead" where an older couple shares a house with a younger family to "mimic the multi-generational family structure of ages past." Wood stoves, rainwater collection, gardening, local lumber - an admirable and large personal experiment, no? Why not start with one of these things?

The Compact - Issue 007 - GOOD: Buy nothing for a year: barter, borrow, or buy secondhand for a year-food, drink, health, and safety necessities excluded. They say they've attracted 9,000 "acolytes," though I couldn't tell whether those folks were actually trying the experiment or not. Related: No Impact Project via the No Impact Man blog.

Behave and feel like young attitude reduces old age ailments: "A recent study conducted by researchers at Harvard revealed that people who dress up like young people are much healthier than those that act their age." This by Ellen Langer, author of the important book Mindfulness. An experiment for Halloween 2011?

BMW, Daimler experiment with upscale rent-by-the-ride: Alternatives to owning your own vehicle, especially for young buyers coping with increased urban congestion. My bias is that we're solving a symptom, not the underlying problem of a national car culture, sprawl, and public transportation that almost any other country would put to shame.

Chile's Grand Innovation Experiment: Instead of "government-sponsored (top-down) tech-cluster efforts," which the author claims have all failed, Chile is experimenting with importing entrepreneurs from all over the world.

The Reusable Cup Experiment: The author shares his experience in reusing a standard Starbucks cup. He got a week out of it, then bumped heads with a Starbucks policy of ... not reusing cups!

Experiment goes awry - and dish turns into an amazing meal: A nice example of a cooking accident that yields something new. I've been thinking for some time about the value of certain kinds of accidents, and (safe) ones in the kitchen are a classic. I wonder if many recipes are the result of unintentional experiments.

Schoolchildren announce bumble-bee breakthrough in top science journal: Describes a scientific paper published in the prestigious Royal Society journal Biology Letters by a class of 8 to 10 years olds. From the paper:

Students in secondary school routinely produce original works of art in their art lessons, compose original pieces of music in their music lessons and write original poems, stories and plays in their English lessons. However, except perhaps at A-level, it is rare for schoolchildren to produce original scientific research in their science lessons. Instead, they carry out the same "experiments" children have been doing for decades ... classic school science practicals. [And] while they may be useful for teaching some aspects of science, it is wrong to call them "experiments" because most students know what the results will be before they do them.

How could we set up schools to do actual science this way?

Tackling Life at the Heart of Complexity [Guest Post]

[I am pleased to share this guest article from Edison user Ralf Westphal, who blogs at http://ralfw.blogspot.com. This is a result of my experiment to offer Edison users a chance to share their thoughts on the Experiment-Driven life. I invite you to consider his point that our lives are complex systems, ones that cannot be represented as simple state machines, and which can only be modified via experimenting. For these kinds of systems, cookie-cutter solutions don't apply (this is my point about books on success - they aren't repeatable), and thinking things through will only take you so far; you have to steer. I also like his ideas on experimenting with blondes. I've not done any editing, just some formatting. Thanks Ralf! -- matt]

You think life's complicated? How then can you find out what to do? Well, I'd say think harder before you decide about any matter. Read up on the subject, talk to people who seem to be knowledgeable about the topic of relevance, consciously employ a decision process like the Analytic Hierarchy Process [1]. Then, in the end, after an acceptable amount of analysis, deliberation, and musing... decide and act accordingly. There'll be a good chance the outcome will be as expected.

When matters are complicated, thinking will help. Through more thinking it will become clear, what to do to achieve a certain outcome. For complicated systems thinking and analysis/decomposition will uncover the actions to be taken to move the system from its current state to the desired state. And having operated a complicated system will make you an expert; that means you become more and more efficient in directing the system from state to state. You'll need less thinking and can rely more on intuition.

Complicated systems are fundamentally predictable. If you know their current state you can "calculate" their resulting state for any given change you are going to apply. The "calculation" might be hard, very hard, but that does not matter. As long as there is some way to "calculate" state transitions a system is just complicated.

Take the Tower of Hanoi [2] or Rubik's Cube [3] for example. To solve those games you just need to think according to their rules.

Take flying an airplane as another example. Moving thousands of tons through the air can be done by a computer. Millions of people trust auto-pilots every day - while you personally might think you could never do it. But it's not magic. For sufficient computing power there is enough time "to think" about what actions to take according to the airplane's current state and current sensory input.

Or is this complicated? It seems to be since a computer can do it, and computers are good at doing rote calculations.

In fact, though, flying an airplane is a complex matter. The combined system of airplane and environment is complex. Flying an airplane is a steering problem, like driving a car is, or riding a bicycle.

Systems are complex, just thinking and analysis does not clearly tell you, which actions to take to move the system from its current (macro) state to the desired (macro) state.

Now, think again about your life. Do you still think life's complicated?

No. Life is a complex system. Except for matters like untying a knot or cooking pasta life is complex: You don't know what the outcome of your actions will be. And thinking hard about a matter of your life will rarely lead to a surefire plan.

Of course, people want their life to be at most complicated. Carrots-and-sticks management is an example of that. A manager incentivizing an employee is trying to push a button to reach a certain result. The reasoning is, "If I give her X, then she'll accomplish the task in a shorter time." That's linear thinking. That's thinking in clear cause effect relationships. However, thinking like "This action will certainly lead to that outcome" is at most working in complicated scenarios.

The world in general and specifically people don't have clearly labeled buttons to push, though, or levers to pull to move them from current state to desired state. Will the employee really accomplish the task in a shorter time just because of the incentive? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the kind of task - working in a quarry or developing a business plan -, and it depends on the kind of bonus - money or time off or a medal - which means it depends on something largely unknown: the state and personality of a living system. Some people can be motivated with money of a certain amount - others not. You never know, at least today. And that's just a small facet of life's complexity.

How about losing weight? What about opening a bakery store called "Our Daily Bread" in New York, offering all sorts of German bread and cake, of course sold by blond girls wearing traditional German Dirndl [4] dresses and speaking with a lovely German accent? Or take flying an airplane as an example again.

How do you go about it? How do you reach your goal of losing 10 pounds or becoming New York's most trendy bakery or safely transporting 250 people from Chicago to L.A. through the air?

Well, you start experimenting. Experiments, lots of experiments are the only way to move a complex system from a current (macro) state to the desired (macro) state.

There is no recipe for losing weight (and not gaining it back soon after) - otherwise somebody would have already become extremely, no, humongously rich by selling access to it. So what you have to do is try something and see what happens. Should you eat more salad and less fat? Nobody really knows. You have to see for yourself. Devise an experiment and faithfully execute it like any scientist would do. Then check the results, compare them to your hypothesis, and either continue along the path of success or change your course by modifying hypothesis/experiment and trying again.

The same goes for opening a bakery in New York. Which part of New York to open it in? Ask market research. Thinking will be of quite some help to find the right location. But should the girls behind the counter really wear traditional German dresses? Do they need to be blond? How many different sorts of bread should you offer? What's the right price to a piece of Sachertorte [5] or a loaf of Vollkornbrot (see [6] for a picture of typical whole-grain bread)? You simply don't know. You have to try and see what happens. Formulate a hypothesis like "Young blond girls traditionally dressed will make a difference in sales" and then run an experiment. Make it small so falsification of your hypothesis won't kick you out of business. But nevertheless experiment. Take small steps, move forward incrementally towards your goal.

That's also called steering. For a given (macro) state "calculate" a new intermediate state in the direction of your ultimate desired (macro) state, take action to move to the new state - then check if you reached it and if you still feel en route to your goal. Chop the complex journey from here to your goal into just complicated little steps. That's what an auto-pilot is doing. That's what a computer is capable of doing. Flying a plane is not like shooting a cannon ball. Shooting is complicated; its outcome can be calculated. By flying is complex. Since a (auto-)pilot does not fully know the state of an airplane's environment he can only make small adjustments and watch what happens.

Life's a complex endeavor. The only way to reach whatever goals you have is by continuous experimentation. That's what you've been doing anyway and can be called learning. But why not take it to the next level? Why not switch to a more explicit experimentation mode? Why not more consciously formulate goals and hypothesize about how to reach them and then try moving towards them in small experimental steps. Think, act, reflect - or as Matthew Cornell phrases it: think, try, learn.

Viewing life as a multitude of ongoing and ever changing experiments is a road leading to more satisfaction. It replaces the fixation on goals with a process. And this process can never fail. So if you refocus on faithful experimentation you're in for a lot of happiness. Because success for an experiment is defined by just producing a result. But how can your experiments not produce any results? Either they support your hypothesis and you're happily right on track towards your goal; or they falsify your hypothesis and you can be happy to know so you can change your course.

An experimenter's life is a happy life. So why not start thinking, trying, learning today to tackle life's complexity?

Endnotes

• [1] Analytic Hierarchy Process
• [2] Tower of Hanoi
• [3] Rubik's Cube
• [4] Traditional German Dirndl dress.
• [5] Sachertorte
• [6] Vollkornbrot (whole-grain bread)