How much thought have you given to the value other people capture from your personal experiments? Presumably, like me, part of the reason you chose to publish your results online is because you thought other people might benefit from the info (in addition to “selfish” reasons like getting free help with analysis of your results, appearing smart and impressive, or being able to access your writings from anywhere with an Internet connection). Perhaps another variable to consider is an estimate of the (discounted) value other people are likely to receive from your self-experimentation.
That surely is a factor, but since it militates in favor of doing any experiment, I’m not sure it’s worth including. I don’t have any good basis for estimating how much value other people capture. If I tried to, cooking up some Fermi estimate based on, say, site traffic & how roughly a dozen people have started melatonin based on my essay, then with just a slight cooking of numbers, I could justify practically any experiment!
Thus, excluding it is a conservative assumption, especially if anyone else contemplating similar experiments wouldn’t necessarily write it up and publicize it like I do.
But why should that be bad if you could justify any experiment? Let’s say you had enough readership and enough ‘active’ readership that quite a few people did the same thing you did.
Then 1. You’re doing a lot of good, and that sounds like a really cool blog and pursuit actually.
And 2. You will need to raise your $/hour in the VoI in order to pick and choose only the very highest-returning experiments.
Both interesting outcomes.
You will need to raise your $/hour in the VoI in order to pick and choose only the very highest-returning experiments. Both interesting outcomes.
I don’t think that follows. Suppose I’m considering two experiments, A with an estimated return of $100 and another B of $200; I muse that I should probably do the $200 B experiment first and only then A $100 (if ever). I then reflect that I have 10 readers who will follow the results, and logically I ought to multiply the returns by 10, to get A actually is worth $1,000 and B is actually worth $2,000. I then muse I should probably do… experiment B.
Choices between experiments aren’t affected by a constant factor applied equally to all experiments: the highest marginal return remains the highest marginal return. (If experiment B was the best one to do with no audience, then it’s still the best one to do with any audience.)
Where the audience would matter is if experiments interact with the audience: maybe no one cares about vitamin D but people are keenly interested in modafinil. Then the highest return could change based on how you use audience numbers.
How much thought have you given to the value other people capture from your personal experiments? Presumably, like me, part of the reason you chose to publish your results online is because you thought other people might benefit from the info (in addition to “selfish” reasons like getting free help with analysis of your results, appearing smart and impressive, or being able to access your writings from anywhere with an Internet connection). Perhaps another variable to consider is an estimate of the (discounted) value other people are likely to receive from your self-experimentation.
That surely is a factor, but since it militates in favor of doing any experiment, I’m not sure it’s worth including. I don’t have any good basis for estimating how much value other people capture. If I tried to, cooking up some Fermi estimate based on, say, site traffic & how roughly a dozen people have started melatonin based on my essay, then with just a slight cooking of numbers, I could justify practically any experiment!
Thus, excluding it is a conservative assumption, especially if anyone else contemplating similar experiments wouldn’t necessarily write it up and publicize it like I do.
But why should that be bad if you could justify any experiment? Let’s say you had enough readership and enough ‘active’ readership that quite a few people did the same thing you did.
Then 1. You’re doing a lot of good, and that sounds like a really cool blog and pursuit actually. And 2. You will need to raise your $/hour in the VoI in order to pick and choose only the very highest-returning experiments. Both interesting outcomes.
I don’t think that follows. Suppose I’m considering two experiments, A with an estimated return of $100 and another B of $200; I muse that I should probably do the $200 B experiment first and only then A $100 (if ever). I then reflect that I have 10 readers who will follow the results, and logically I ought to multiply the returns by 10, to get A actually is worth $1,000 and B is actually worth $2,000. I then muse I should probably do… experiment B.
Choices between experiments aren’t affected by a constant factor applied equally to all experiments: the highest marginal return remains the highest marginal return. (If experiment B was the best one to do with no audience, then it’s still the best one to do with any audience.)
Where the audience would matter is if experiments interact with the audience: maybe no one cares about vitamin D but people are keenly interested in modafinil. Then the highest return could change based on how you use audience numbers.