Life As Science
Introduction
We have formal methodologies for testing hypotheses about universal fundamentals and harnessing subsequent discoveries for practical application, yet we rarely apply any rigour to the science of ourselves: “What am I like?”, “What can I do?” “What resources and properties can I exploit?”
My life is a science. I seek deeper knowledge about the underlying rules and truths of myself and what I am capable of. In this pursuit, I employ a practical framework for experimenting on myself and moving towards desirable outcomes.
The subjects of experimentation can be anything about myself. It ranges from diet and health to riding electric scooters to settling on a reading schedule to internalizing useful heuristics.
My most impactful experiments so far:
- Perceiving difficulty as a growth opportunity: When trying to do new physical activities such as skiing, or when playing a new competitive board game, or when toying with a new entrepreneurial endeavor, feelings of frustration can degenerate into hopelessness. I am now more cognizant of this phenomenon in myself and try to think of it as an opportunity to get better or as a game.
- Internalizing “Copernicus and Chaos”: I will talk more about “Copernicus and Chaos” in Origin story below. This experiment leads me to reexamine my environment and my active thoughts several times a day, in an effort to shake up my preconceptions.
- Coming out of defensive mode: If a peer says something that disagrees with a belief I have or threatens my self-image in even a minor way, I can become caustic and defensive. Now, within seconds I am aware of the experience and make better decisions, despite the physiological changes in my body.
Some of my stranger experiments:
- Somersaulting: I hadn't somersaulted since I was a child and had become very anxious about performing it as an adult. I rectified that by doing several somersaults and writing down how I felt about them and whether I would continue to do them regularly.
- Lying down in public: I have an aversion to lying down in public because I disliked an unflattering photo someone took of me when I was sleeping. However, lying down in public--in a park a park, for example--is an enjoyable activity, so I tried doing it again.
- Experimental framework: My framework for experimentation is not above scrutiny. It should improve and grow based on feedback. This experiment led to this post being written.
How does it work? I will describe the inspiration for the framework and then the details of how it fits into my workflow. If you are only interested in the practical details, skip the next section.
Origin story
I attended a rationality workshop in early 2018 that introduced me to several new concepts and techniques for better understanding the world and getting stuff done.
One of the concepts that resonated with me was “Copernicus and Chaos”, which introduced me to the exploit-explore dichotomy of actions you can take to get what you want. Generally, “exploit” actions use knowledge and skills you already have to produce value, while “explore” actions surface new ideas and activities that may be better than what you already know, but don't produce any value when you do them. I would guess that the actions of most adults (including myself), could be labeled “exploit” in the scope of my life.
“Copernicus and Chaos” also suggests that, without more information, it's usually safe to assume that an unknown quantity falls near the median. Combined with the “explore” / “exploit” ideas, these two principles form the Chaos Heuristic:
Odds are, you're nowhere near [your potential], and you don't know what you don't know. So go exploring!
This heuristic inspired me to start integrating the rationality techniques I'd learned in the workshop into my daily routines; however, at the time, I was reading work by Charlie Munger and Eliezer Yudkowsky, so I shortly began reconsidering and “attempting to falsify” my beliefs, aversions, and preferrences. Every morning, I prompted myself:
- Fixed vs growth mindset: What things are you still fixed about?
- What's something a friend likes that you don't? Why's that?
- What narratives do you live by? How are they constraining your experience?
- Are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to someone / something?
These questions begot many ideas for changes I could try. For example:
- Is there a way of reducing car sickness without drugs?
- Could I enjoy traveling alone?
- Why don't I like visiting libraries and bookstores?
- Should I try to compete in an athletic sport?
- How would I feel about accessorizing my phone case?
- Did I ever seriously pray for anything?
- Should I try not being punctual?
- When was the last time I shouted about Jesus on the street corner?
- Why do I care so much about how my computer is configured?
This went on for several months and expanded in scope, until it felt like the process was too ad hoc and inconsistent. So I formalized the best parts of my improvised system and created an experimentation framework to track everything.
Experimentation Framework
Lab notebook
What would an experiment be without a lab notebook!? For each new experiment, I include the following items:
- Context: Any background information for what led to this experiment or why it's necessary
- Outcome: The S.M.A.R.T.-oriented value I hope to get out of this experiment. What kind of person will I be when the experiment has succeeded? How will I know?
- Methods: The means by which I hope to attain the outcome. This ranges widely depending on the experiment.
- Notes: Day-to-day thoughts about the experiment. Suggestions for improving it or reinforcement that it's working. If the experiment is supposed to affect my body (e.g. caffeine consumption, humidifying my apartment, etc), I use a “block design”, wherein I apply the “treatment” for X days, then stop for X days, then apply again for X days, and finally stop for X days. This reduces the chances that I'll attribute an effect to noise
Here are some of the methods I use:
- Checklist: For many things I do on a regular basis, I have a checklist. For this method, I add an item to one of my checklists. Then, each time I perform the that item, I'll spend 5-10 seconds adding notes to the lab notebook on whether or not the checklist item seems to be having the intended effect
- Task or project: If the outcome requires me to perform some tasks outside of my normal routine
- Environment change: If changing something in my room, apartment, etc will cause me to do something related to the experiment
- TAP (Trigger Action Plan): A technique I learned at the rationality workshop. I create an association between a sensory experience (e.g. seeing or feeling a specific thing) with a quick action
- SRS (Spaced Repetition Software): Create an association between two ideas by regularly reviewing it as a flashcard
- Over-learn: For the duration of the experiment, frequently perform a behavior to develop a habit (I use Mind Jogger on the iPhone to remind me)
Experiment Lifecycle
Each experiment starts out in the “Conducting” phase (tracking which phase each experiment is in is essentially a Kanban board). I fill out the experiment lab notebook's context, outcome, and methods sections and then add it to the “Conducting” phase. I also schedule an “evaluation” date in the future where I will seriously consider if the experiment has converged on its outcome. Depending on the experiment, the evaluation might be a couple weeks in the future or several months.
Every week until the evaluation, I spend about 20 minutes reading through my notes (which are timestamped) on each “Conducting” experiment and tweak the experiment methods as needed with the hope that it will make the experiment converge on the desired outcome faster.
Finally, during the evaluation, if the experiment is not doing well, I must decide whether to throw it away or totally revamp it and set a new evaluation date. If the experiment has largely converged on the outcome, I mark it as “Full-Time” and review it every month or so.
Examples
Pomodoro cycles
I used The Pomodoro Technique in the past to break up tasks into manageable 25 minute chunks. On an older computer, I had a program that reminded me to go walk around for a few minutes every hour. Both of these things were beneficial to me and I would like to do them again. This is the context.
The outcome I wanted was to (1) break up larger tasks into several pomodoro work sessions and (2) after each pomodoro, to perform a quick checklist of things. For now, the only item on the checklist would be to get up and walk around for 1-2 minutes.
The initial methods I devised for this were specific to my setup. I created 2 TAPs (TAPs are referenced above):
- When I mark a TODO item as what I'm actively working on (I already do this) and I see the grey “active task” indicator, I will start a pomodoro clock (keyboard shortcut)
- When I see the purple circle in the system notification indicating that the pomodoro is over, I will open the pomodoro checklist (keyboard shortcut)
That was pretty much it. It only took a few repetitions to make this a habit. However, I noted that when I went to walk around, I would often think of a household chore that had to get done and wander off to do it, which was undesirable. During the next review for this experiment, I changed my “walk around” checklist item to specify that I would stay near my desk.
After 2 weeks, my calendar reminded me that it was time to evaluate the experiment. Looking back at my notes and reviewing my memory, I felt like I had converged on the value I wanted out of this experiment, so I marked it “Full-Time”.
Course correction
Improving my decision making and processes for getting stuff done is an essential part of growth. I noticed that there was occasionally a pattern to certain bad situations and failed projects. This is the context.
The outcome I wanted was to have a feedback loop to notice these problems more explicitly.
The initial method I created to accomplish this was to use a decision journal:
- I added a checklist item to my “new project” checklist to record an entry in my decision journal if the project would require significant work
- Whenever I created a decision journal entry, I added a calendar reminder 6 months in the future to review the decision and my thoughts on it and see if I could spot a pattern
This experiment is ongoing and I've only recorded 2 journal entries thus far, so I haven't been able to perform a meaningful review or evaluation.
Maintenance day
In “The Productivity Project”, Chris Bailey suggests doing a lot of “maintenance tasks” (e.g. cleaning, calling people, buying groceries) together on the same day. I liked this idea, since I had found it disruptive to do many of these tasks interspersed among my other tasks. This is the context.
The outcome I wanted was to perform weekly maintenance tasks on the same day and prefer this to doing them throughout the week.
In order to implement a Maintenance Day, my methods were pretty simple:
- Every week, I opened my list of “maintenance tasks” and added them to my agenda for Monday (Monday was already the day I put out trash for the city waste collection)
- Every Monday, I did the maintenance tasks
I noted after a couple weeks that some I often ran out of time for some tasks. Additionally, while I preferred doing house-related tasks on the same day, making calls (e.g. doctor's office, DMV/RMV, bank) on the same day wore me out. During the next review for this experiment, I removed the calls from Maintenance Day. Additionally, I stopped scheduling some tasks specifically for Monday and, instead, just made sure they got done by the end of the week.
Two months later, during the experiment's evaluation, I decided to retire the experiment because I believed regularly dedicating a whole day to low-impact tasks was ultimately wasteful and it seemed only marginally preferrable to doing the tasks throughout the week.
Specifics
Whichever tools you think will work best for implementing the experimentation framework probably will work best, but I want to describe a basic setup. According to my description above, the key features you need are:
- A place to store lab notebooks. Since each lab notebook grows, a physical notebook might work, but a digital one makes a lot more sense e.g. a file directory with separate files or a notes program.
- A central status board to track what the status of each experiment is (i.e. “Conducting”, “Full-Time”, “Retired”). A physical kanban board, an issue tracking service like Trello, or a simple text document all work fine here.
- (optional) A place to write down future experiment ideas.
- A calendar or agenda program to schedule regular reviews and experiment evaluations.
In my case, I use org-mode, which is a collection of outlining / agenda features in the Emacs text-editing program. Key features include collapsing and expanding list items in the outline, scheduling specific list items into a centralized agenda, and linking from one file to another like on Wikipedia.
In my central “Experiments.org” file (#2), I track the state of each experiment and keep a list of future experiments (#3). Each experiment in the central experiments file links to its full lab notebook (#1).
When I start a new experiment, I copy a template lab notebook which has all the notebook sections described above (outcome, methods, reviews, notes) and save it as a new one. Next, I fill in the outcome and methods. Finally, I link to this new lab notebook from the “Conducting” section of my central experiments file and schedule the experiment evaluation for some date in the future.
I have a weekly reminder to review experiments that I'm “Conducting” and a monthly reminder to review experiments that are “Full-Time”.
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