Overcoming Bias

Overcoming Bias

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Personal experimentation: context specific?
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Personal experimentation: context specific?

Katja Grace
Jan 31, 2013

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Personal experimentation: context specific?
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A last way that personal experimentation could be worth it for me, yet not already completely covered by others, is that most of the facts one is likely to learn are quite context-specific. That way, everyone in history might have figured out for themselves what the best time and sugar-content for lunch is, and it would be worthless to me.

This also seems quite plausible. It could either be that people are so varied that there is just no good answer to whether it is better for productivity to eat snacks throughout the day or a few big meals for instance. Or it could be that which value of one parameter is best depends on all the other ones, so if you tend to eat more sugar than me and sleep less and laugh more, exercise might make you less sleepy than I.

The latter possibility bodes poorly for those who would experiment a lot. After you have determined the best quantity and timing of exercise, you might go on to try to optimize your sleep or sugar intake and make the original finding worthless.

This explanation would also seem to explain the observations in the last post: that many people do seem quite keen advise on the details of one’s life, but that the content of such recommendations seem a bit all over the place. Perhaps each person’s discoveries really do work well for them, but just look like a sea of noise to all the other people.


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By Robin Hanson · Hundreds of paid subscribers
This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.

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Personal experimentation: context specific?
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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15, 2023

This site seems relevant for this post http://quantifiedself.com/

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15, 2023

This is so unsystematic and vague that I fail to see how anything here can be discussed properly; let speculation go wild.

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