What are the origins of change in our world?

My current experiment in writing my book is explain how TTL is based on first principles, something I was trying to get it in my post The Experiment-Driven Life Universe v0.1. The first one, the world is constantly changing, leads to the question, "Why?" What is it about the world that makes it change? Is it the common interpretation of the Second law of thermodynamics, that is, the universe is always in motion towards equilibrium (put very roughly)? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

A New Edison Feature: Categories!

I am very pleased to announce a nice little Edison feature - Categories! It's pretty simple. When browsing experiments you can go to the Categories tab to see the five most recent experiments under each of 14 categories we decided to start with:

• Beauty/Style
• Diet
• Family/Parenting
• Fitness/Exercise/Sports
• Health/Medicine
• Hobbies/Recreation
• Home/Garden
• Money/Finances
• Other
• Pets
• Relationships/Dating/Sex
• Spiritual
• Travel
• Work

(Deciding which ones to use is itself an experiment.)

You can click an experiment to see its details, or you can click the "View all __ Experiments" link at the bottom to see all experiments in that category. There are two views - Feed (a detailed chronological view like the All Experiments page) and List (a simple list of titles).

You can specify the category for new or existing experiments in the popup menu on the "Create (or Edit) Experiment" page. All existing experiments were set to "Other," so you'll see the other categories start to fill in as we go forward.

We added this feature because people new to Edison were not getting a broad enough (and compelling enough) sense of all the great stuff people are trying from the All Experiments page, which shows activity for all types of experiments. I'm excited to see how you like it.

Michel de Montaigne and The Experiment-Driven Life

I'm always excited when someone new shares insights into living life as an experiment, so I was delighted when a reader told me about Tim Ferris's guest poster Ryan Holiday and his lovely essay The Experimental Life: An Introduction to Michel de Montaigne. In it he interprets how 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne's writing relates to living The Experiment-Driven Life. I thought I'd give a hearty welcome to Ryan in joining the conversation, and share my response from the Think, Try, Learn perspective.

I hadn't heard of de Montaigne before, which is not surprising given the meager literary coverage of my science background. (Should all scientists take a poetry course?)

Question: Do you know his work? Any other implications for living life as an experiment? Any other similar philosophers whose work relates to TTL?

Thanks Ryan!

(Note: You can find de Montaigne's complete 'Essais' online here.)

The self-tracking movement

At the meta level, Ryan has introduced Tim's readers to the growing self-tracking movement, and it's really exciting. People are collecting data and getting insights into themselves and the world across all domains - there are gadgets and mobile apps for everything from tracking weight, to sleep, to how much power you use, to reading, to sex. (Preferably not all at once, though - bad science.) In addition to Seth Roberts - the quintessential self-experimenter Ryan mentions on his blog (check out Will Butter Make You Smarter?) - Tim's readers may want to know about the Quantified Self blog at www.kk.org/quantifiedself/. It's hosted by senior Wired.com editor Kevin Kelly and by Gary Wolf, who wrote The Data-Driven Life in the NYTimes.

Ourselves As A Job

Exactly. What Ryan's getting at is the core idea of applying the experimental mindset to life, what I call the Experiment-Driven life. Not only can we deal with problems, challenges, and opportunities as experiments, but we can learn to be bolder and try new things. This opens up a world of experiences that for those of us don't have the Ferriss zest gene :-) It also puts mistakes and failure into healthier perspective (mistakes are natural and essential, and experimenting in life guarantees success).

Self-Experimentation and Observation

Observation is a key to treating life as an experiment, and to living happier. It does a few important things. First, it puts you into what I call a "healthy sense of detachment" - the mode of getting some distance and perspective on things by looking at them objectively. For example, this feels a whole lot better than the alternative thought (that of "Oh sh*t!"): "I just got some interesting data. What does this mean, and what do I want to do with it?" Second, it makes us more mindful. Living in the present is a key to being happy, and keen and vigilant observation - keeping your scientist eyes open - sucks you right into the moment. The key to this is keeping your curiosity alive, and the key to *that* is asking questions (one of the integral practices I talk about).

Playful relationship with existence

Adding playfulness to our lives is important, made all the harder because being too serious is an occupational hazard of growing up. From the life-as-experiment perspective, playful minds are more relaxed, and therefore more prone to see novel patterns or solutions. This helps us grow and discover more about ourselves. One way to do this is to look at the world as a "black box" where you play with poking it with a stick (i.e., sending in an input) and seeing what happens (looking at resulting outputs). You can do this with people (make yourself a detective and try to figure out what gets them excited), space (hiding, spinning, or simply taking a different route to work), or things (smelling, disassembling, or tossing, for example).

Intimate knowledge of ourselves

Yes, and not only that, it gives us the opportunity for insight and self-knowledge, which makes it easier to work in harmony with ourselves, others, and the world. Working from measurements, I call this the "enlightenment cycle": Observation leads to Awareness leads to Change. This is a much more effective route to change (the implementation of self-improvement) than a direct approach. Habit changes are a great example.

In French his word "essay" also means "trial."

This is a nice insight, Ryan. An important practice in setting up effective experiments is to treat them as *prototypes*, including making them small, focusing on the "frontier" (getting the maximum amount of information for the least amount of effort), and keeping the iterations short. (Tim is brilliant at the creativity necessary to dream up good ones, such as using ads to explore product viability.) Also, using the language of prototypes helps strengthen the muscles of the experimental mindset. Saying "Let's just give this a little try" is much less threatening (and overwhelming!) than committing to a giant effort.

Know what you're aiming for before bothering with the process

Interesting point. This brings up a contradiction I've been thinking about - how to reconcile a top-down and rigorous scientific method (state your theory, design an experiment with appropriate variables, etc.) with the more informal, personal approach of living life experimentally. My solution is a simplified version of the scientific method - the Think, Try, Learn cycle. This is more accessible to folks, and allows you to start anywhere and move around as you see fit. If you know where you're aiming, work straight through from THINK to TRY to LEARN. However, if you're not sure what you want to discover (but there are still many reasons to experiment), you might start out at TRY, for example. It's a way to gain the intimate knowledge of ourselves you mention, but not be stuck at knowing exactly where to start.

Keep a Commonplace Book

Absolutely! Ryan has discovered an important practice, one that all good scientists do, that of keeping an experimenter's journal. This is akin to a professional or personal journal (mine's a giant text file), but it's focused on tracking both the data *and* your observations of the process itself. The latter is crucial because it's where insights and self-discovery happen. Because when it comes down to it, the living is in the present; the past is gone and the future hasn't happened yet! FYI We're building an experimenter's journal called Edison, the Think, Try, Learn experimenter's journal. It's at edison.thinktrylearn.com.

Wisdom that can be accessed in times of crisis, depression or joy

Beautifully put, Ryan. From a practical perspective, those are great triggers for for reflection. I also do opportunistic discovery by randomly looking around entries when I'm searching for something specific - kinda' like stumbling on a great book on the library shelves when looking for something unrelated.

Skeptic's notion of questioning what he "knew"

Certainty is an important component of our being essentially irrational creatures. Burton's book "On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not" is a nice introduction. The solution, as Ryan is getting at, is to model *yourself* by recording expectations, observing how they pan out, and doing self-correction as a result. This is not common in the "echo chamber" culture of politics, news, and blogging, and the greater climate of not being willing to admit you're wrong, or seeing changing your mind as a weakness. Much better is to adopt science's built-in skepticism and assumption that we don't (or can't) know it all.

Excuses about being too busy to do any of this

Definitely - changing how you think is hard. One way to get started is to try one or two "micro-experiments" - things like starting a one-week Media Diet, or the put-one-back technique for portion control when eating. Small things like these can help start the shift to the experimental perspective.

Quotes

Side note: I'm a collector of great quotes (jeez - over 600 of them in the big-arse), and Michel de Montaigne said some nice ones, which follow.

• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
• Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
• To philosophize is to doubt.
• It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
• There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
• I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
• There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
• I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
• Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.

What's a Good Experimental Design to Test "Oil Pulling"?

In the Edison experiment oil pulling, experimental enthusiast Diane is testing the controversial idea that swishing oil in the mount for ~20 minutes/day lessens the pain of an tooth abscess. As I wrote in Insights, stories, and surprises from Edison, as the TTL leader I'm working to keep my opinions to myself, and focus on encouraging experimentation and moderate if necessary. I've not had to do the latter until passionate comments put the experiment at risk of being "hijacked" as one Edison user put it.

This brought up the question of whether having a control and, doing "real" science is necessary to get valid results, i.e., to have believable evidence that the technique works.

What I'd like to do here is strengthen my understanding of the scientific method by analyzing this experiment's design. Note that in applying Think, Try, Learn we are limited in how rigorously we apply the method. In general we adopt the spirit of science (hence the simplified "Think, Try, Learn" name) but in this case let's play with how to make the experiment as valid as possible given our limitations, such as having a sample of one. (Note: A forthcoming Edison feature is being able to set up group experiments where more than one person can participate in the same experiment, with the system calculating statistically-valid results. This will be extremely cool.)

Following are some possibilities I thought of. I'm new at this and I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. (Note: In talking about variables I'm using the Science Buddies guide to variables).

In all cases, I'm told we are using an "interrupted time-series" design. From A Short Course on Evaluation Basics:

In situations where a control group is not possible, if (1) data on the treatment group can be obtained for several periods both before and after the participants are exposed to the program, and (2) if there is a sudden change in scores, and (3) if there is a continuation of the change, that is considered to be good evidence of the program's impact.

Jumping right in, our question is always:

Will oil pulling Decrease abscess sensitivity?

To get a good run and to give the swishing time to work, how about we test for four weeks? Two weeks doing the swishing followed by two not doing it.

Second, our dependent variable (What we observe) is abscess sensitivity. In researching oral sensitivity I found Measuring Tooth Sensitivity from The American Dental Hygienists' Association, where they recommend stimulating the area then using a Verbal Rating Scale (VRS) to measure results. The scale ranges from 0 (No discomfort/pain, but aware of stimulus) to 3 (Marked discomfort/pain that lasted more than 10 seconds). How we measure this is a good question given that Diane probably does not want to visit her dentist every week for an unpleasant professional measurement session! How about we decide the same area to stimulate each time, and then once a day (or week) press a rubber tipped gum stimulator like this to the area and measure the result using the VRS scale.

Finally, for our independent variable (What to change) will be whether the swishing is done or not. Note: A clever variation suggested is to make the liquid itself the independent variable, say by swishing two weeks with oil followed by two weeks with water. Our controlled variables (What I keep the same) would be the swishing activity itself, the amount and type of oil used, any oral care she's currently doing, etc.

This still doesn't account for the possibility that during the intervening two weeks there was something else going on in the mouth, which is always changing, but I'm shooting for a good start. What do you think?

A variation: Measure toxins absorbed by the oil

The Oil pulling discussion at The Skeptics Society Forum has plenty of other design and variable suggestions, including this one where instead of measuring pain, you would spit the used oil out onto grass and see if it dies from the supposed toxins that the oil absorbs and removes.

Insights, stories, and surprises from Edison, October, 2010

One of the biggest thrills for me in creating Edison is watching it grow, which makes the recent burst of activity all the more exciting. This is not only because people are actually using it (which is itself remarkable in the face of so much competition for our attention) but because what they're doing is fascinating. As are their insights, which I offer along with a huge thank you.

(Productivity) Roll the Dice!

In Roll dice to decide next task, master experimenter James Bishop (creator of the mood-tracking site Finding Optimism) tried beating his procrastination by randomly selecting tasks

Today I'm going to decide on each next task according to a roll of dice and commit myself to no distractions in between. (I've built a couple of "reward" tasks into the list).

He calls it "a huge success" and extended it for a week. He's mixed in the Pomodoro Technique, which a client of mine uses. "The basic unit of work in the Pomodoro Technique can be split in five simple steps:"

1. Choose a task to be accomplished
2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

Uber-experimenter Brock Tice has joined in, as has new user Johan, and went so far as to create his Taskomatic tool to help choose tasks.

Going on a Media Diet

Another prolific TTL'er, Ralf Westphal decided to Go on a New Media Diet for 10 days:

I will cut down on the (new) media I'm consuming. I will cancel 2 magazine subscriptions, will not check Twitter (although I might myself write a tweet), and I will not read any of the 90 news feed I'm subscribed to. (I'm not doing anything with Facebook.)

We are almost all overloaded, and this experiment is a good way to determine just how much. You can find related posts on the media diets here.

Let's go for a Walk. Across Germany

An ambitious experiment that's Ralf's also doing is to Walk from Munich to Nuremberg in 6 Days. He had some very fine insights as a result of the challenges and surprises:

One realization: Don't ask "why?" but "what for?" Because what happened during our non-walking days was we developed some cool ideas for a software development tool and started implementing it. Looks good. And I found time to write an article for a magazine.

Staying agile is core. Have a plan - but adapt to change. Analyse what went wrong why - and move on with what's feasible.

And we had another great idea: Instead of walking the whole day the next time we do sth like this we will alternate between walking and working. Like yesterday and today. Some walking/strolling, some working on stuff we talked about while walking. This would combine generating ideas while walking with starting to implement them. Walking induced creativity ;-)

Excellent work, Ralf!

Testing Folk Wisdom for Weather Prediction

You might have heard the adage, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in morning, sailor's warning". Well user Diane put it to the test in Mackerel Sky. What I love is this discovery of hers:

I was just about to close this experiment when I discovered something new that I hadn't EVER noticed before. On Sunday heavy rain was predicted for Thursday. On Monday and Tuesday there was a small amount of mackerel sky. On Wednesday there was more. And on Thursday it rained. It was building up all week. I had never noticed that before because the weather pundits claim you get rain within several hours of a mackerel sky.

Read a nice analysis from the Library of Congress Home in Is "Red sky at night, sailor's delight,Red sky in morning, sailor's warning" true? Everyday Mysteries.

Passionate discussion: Oil Pulling (plus a lesson learned)

The experiment oil pulling brought out some strong discussion, kicked off by the question,

I don't suppose you'd humor me and try something besides oil, like water, with the same technique?

The idea behind this is to add a control (part of the Scientific Method) to separate out the impact of the particular liquid swished. If you're interested opinions on the validity of the technique, check out this fascinating discussion at The Skeptics Society.

At a meta level, this discussion was an eye-opener for me. As the Think, Try, Learn leader and Edison moderator I learned from this that I need to tune in to discussions that might, as Brock puts it, "hijack the experiment." What I'll experiment with is moving it elsewhere, say to a blog post I set up for the specific topic. In a sense this is a good problem to have; people are using the system, trying out the TTL methodology, and doing things they care about that might help improve themselves. In the process they are showing courage by making some of their experiments public, which I am honored by and respect.

(As an aside, the ability to create private experiments should be implemented in a few weeks. This feature will allow you to create experiments that only invited people can view and comment on, which is a top Edison request. Exciting!)