The reason I’m not mentioning a step-by-step guideline is as follows:
Giving people a step by step guide, if someone claims to follow it they could sue me (as an individual) - I don’t want that. I will share it with people who seem to be good actors and actually interested—e.g. I shared it with the Lighthaven team, if they want to share it with people, I can’t stop them—but the liability is on them. I obviously shared what I did with all the people that self-experimented as “intervention”, if they want to plug other people in, fine by me.
My interest here is getting more information and aggregating it (which is public, I’m just measuring before/after for now) -- I’d like for people to reach out to me, for us to sync on data gathering, and for me to be updated on how they are doing whatever they are doing so I know if the before/after data is reliable.
It would take like 5 pages with if/else structures to get a perfect outline.
You need some dedication and common sense to do this, in that regard, it’s easy enough to look at my hypothesis and run a quick literature review then reach a conclusion about what you should do—and I’d actually like a “1000 ships” approach here where more people try to replicate in their own way—maybe my way of putting it all together is wrong, I’m starting from out of distribution data and using theory + heuristics that I’m not an expert at to translate it into something relevant for normal people.
If what you’re asking for is not “give me a step-by-step guide as to what to do”—then I’d ask what is unclear from what I already wrote, like, the general model I have should be enough if your intention isn’t to perfectly replicate this but just to extract “quick fix” style solutions for yourself (but those solution won’t work)
My worry here is that I say something like “One of the things you can do is to experiment with racetams and through careful monitoring and mood-observation figure out which one to take, at what dose, through what method, so that it doesn’t affect your BP or HR and feels good.
And then someone goes ahead, overdoses on a bottle of X labeled “not for human consumption”, and blames me. Or that someone does it badly (e.g. decoupled from the other interventions, without doing the careful experimenting required to figure out the correct substance/dosage/am) and then says “well, I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work”—Ignoring the fact that what I said involved 20 other things.
People tend to want easy solutions that they can apply in their sleep… and I actually want to build one, but I am like 2 years away in the best of cases, until then I’d rather recruit dedicated people to help me figure stuff out, as opposed to give advice about which I am uncertain, which people will follow poorly, and which makes me liable for spelling out those solutions
I’m saying “I don’t think people that have a short enough attention span and level of interest to not even want to DM me will do a 4hr/day thing for 2 weeks”
But maybe some of them would be interested in DYI-ing it, because that’s a different mindset.
DYI-ing it without specific steps quite simply isn’t replicating it, it’s doing something else, and any results—beneficial or not—couldn’t be attributed to your experiment. I also assume that if you want people to have faith in the non-DYI full version of your experiment, then you need to share the exact steps similar to how peer review works and allow others to replicate exactly each step.
I admit that I don’t know much about the Scientific Method other than what I learned in High School, so correct me if I’m wrong.
We do indeed need to make sure plane A and plane B are the same in all instances, I’d say that engineering not science, but in the last 50 years little science has happened so people seem to confuse the two.
If we are trying to prove something like:
Planes can fly
Then the specific plane design is less important.
My point here is something like “I did a thing, and people seem to have higher IQs upon retesting than control, and I’m controlling for things like motivation, memorization, exercise and diet” therefore, given that we don’t expect anything (maybe sans stimulants?) to increase IQ, or at least anything besides going from slob to active lifestyle wise, this finding is interesting.
If you already believe that this sort of increase is possible and easy then without me comparing it with other such experiments and outlining my method precisely in a way that a 3rd party can replicate—the claim would be useless.
But that’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying “Nobody has ever tried to take a cohort of adults at +1 to +3 STDs of IQ and have it improve”, I did (well, people did it and I collected the data) and it seems possible, therefore something interesting is happening. Given that most people here would say this thing is not possible, this should be an update that it’s possible.
I don’t want to update on the precise step-by-step method by which it’s possible, much like, if I had a crappy plane design and saw it fly, I wouldn’t want people to replicate my crappy plane design, I’d want people to try and design better planes, after updating on the fact that building planes is, in principle, possible.
This goes doubly so if by publishing the exact plane design the FAA would sue me.
This might not need pointing out, but could still be worth saying: whatever your motivations, without providing much concrete evidence for a moderately strong claim (increase IQ by almost 1 SD in 2 weeks), it’s hard to believe you.
The reason I’m not mentioning a step-by-step guideline is as follows:
Giving people a step by step guide, if someone claims to follow it they could sue me (as an individual) - I don’t want that. I will share it with people who seem to be good actors and actually interested—e.g. I shared it with the Lighthaven team, if they want to share it with people, I can’t stop them—but the liability is on them. I obviously shared what I did with all the people that self-experimented as “intervention”, if they want to plug other people in, fine by me.
My interest here is getting more information and aggregating it (which is public, I’m just measuring before/after for now) -- I’d like for people to reach out to me, for us to sync on data gathering, and for me to be updated on how they are doing whatever they are doing so I know if the before/after data is reliable.
It would take like 5 pages with if/else structures to get a perfect outline.
You need some dedication and common sense to do this, in that regard, it’s easy enough to look at my hypothesis and run a quick literature review then reach a conclusion about what you should do—and I’d actually like a “1000 ships” approach here where more people try to replicate in their own way—maybe my way of putting it all together is wrong, I’m starting from out of distribution data and using theory + heuristics that I’m not an expert at to translate it into something relevant for normal people.
If what you’re asking for is not “give me a step-by-step guide as to what to do”—then I’d ask what is unclear from what I already wrote, like, the general model I have should be enough if your intention isn’t to perfectly replicate this but just to extract “quick fix” style solutions for yourself (but those solution won’t work)
My worry here is that I say something like “One of the things you can do is to experiment with racetams and through careful monitoring and mood-observation figure out which one to take, at what dose, through what method, so that it doesn’t affect your BP or HR and feels good.
And then someone goes ahead, overdoses on a bottle of X labeled “not for human consumption”, and blames me. Or that someone does it badly (e.g. decoupled from the other interventions, without doing the careful experimenting required to figure out the correct substance/dosage/am) and then says “well, I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work”—Ignoring the fact that what I said involved 20 other things.
People tend to want easy solutions that they can apply in their sleep… and I actually want to build one, but I am like 2 years away in the best of cases, until then I’d rather recruit dedicated people to help me figure stuff out, as opposed to give advice about which I am uncertain, which people will follow poorly, and which makes me liable for spelling out those solutions
How do you reconcile the need to “replicate” scientifically and people trying “in their own way”?
How is it contradicting ?
I’m saying “I don’t think people that have a short enough attention span and level of interest to not even want to DM me will do a 4hr/day thing for 2 weeks”
But maybe some of them would be interested in DYI-ing it, because that’s a different mindset.
So for those people I’d rather they DYI a thing.
DYI-ing it without specific steps quite simply isn’t replicating it, it’s doing something else, and any results—beneficial or not—couldn’t be attributed to your experiment. I also assume that if you want people to have faith in the non-DYI full version of your experiment, then you need to share the exact steps similar to how peer review works and allow others to replicate exactly each step.
I admit that I don’t know much about the Scientific Method other than what I learned in High School, so correct me if I’m wrong.
So, if we are trying to prove something like:
Plane A flies faster than plane B
We do indeed need to make sure plane A and plane B are the same in all instances, I’d say that engineering not science, but in the last 50 years little science has happened so people seem to confuse the two.
If we are trying to prove something like:
Planes can fly
Then the specific plane design is less important.
My point here is something like “I did a thing, and people seem to have higher IQs upon retesting than control, and I’m controlling for things like motivation, memorization, exercise and diet” therefore, given that we don’t expect anything (maybe sans stimulants?) to increase IQ, or at least anything besides going from slob to active lifestyle wise, this finding is interesting.
If you already believe that this sort of increase is possible and easy then without me comparing it with other such experiments and outlining my method precisely in a way that a 3rd party can replicate—the claim would be useless.
But that’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying “Nobody has ever tried to take a cohort of adults at +1 to +3 STDs of IQ and have it improve”, I did (well, people did it and I collected the data) and it seems possible, therefore something interesting is happening. Given that most people here would say this thing is not possible, this should be an update that it’s possible.
I don’t want to update on the precise step-by-step method by which it’s possible, much like, if I had a crappy plane design and saw it fly, I wouldn’t want people to replicate my crappy plane design, I’d want people to try and design better planes, after updating on the fact that building planes is, in principle, possible.
This goes doubly so if by publishing the exact plane design the FAA would sue me.
This might not need pointing out, but could still be worth saying: whatever your motivations, without providing much concrete evidence for a moderately strong claim (increase IQ by almost 1 SD in 2 weeks), it’s hard to believe you.