Self-Experimentation
Show Notes
Systematic techniques
- CFAR: The rationality workshop Ulysse attended
- CFAR Trigger Action Planning (TAP), originally known as Implementation Intentions
- Ulysse's self-experimentation framework
Weight-loss research
Other references
Music
- Intro music: Vlog Music Cafe Type Hip-Hop Instrumental Chill Lo-Fi Beat by Oliwia Orłowska
- Outro music: Game Over [Super Mario World Lofi/hiphop remix] by Neighborhood Vandal
Transcript
Ulysse: Hey. This is The Growth Podcast with your hosts, Ben and Brendon. This episode, we'll be talking about self-experimentation and the virtues of being changeable.
Brendon: Ben, you came up with a term called self-experimentation that you want to do a podcast on. I'm curious what that means to you.
Ulysse: I think self-experimentation to me is all about viewing yourself as changeable. You and I have talked over the years about fixed versus growth mindset and all the literature around that kind of idea... of instead of giving up whenever you hit a barrier, of just trying to improve or get around it. And so I think self-experimentation is wrapped up in that.
Ulysse: Do you have any fundamental thoughts on self-experimentation?
Brendon: Yeah, so I think that self-experimentation is part of the broader methodology around self-improvement in general. As you were saying with the fixed and growth mindsets, one of the first things that's required for self-improvement to actually work is for people to have the idea that they are capable of change and also know about how they can effect that change in themselves. And once someone has the motivation to self-improve and once they know ways that they might be able to progress on self-improvement, bringing self-experimentation into that can make a difference between successful or failed improvements.
Brendon: As an example, someone might try to adopt a certain behavior, like running outside or something, to try to reach a goal like losing weight. That might not always be the best action or behavior, according to the research, but it also might not necessarily be the best action or behavior according to what that person's self best responds to. And self-experimentation understands that there's a difference between what the research says is best, there's a difference between what might work for someone, right? And that it's really important to try out different things and see how well they are working so that you can actually self-improve in a way that works.
Ulysse: Right. That's sort of where my self-experimentation framework came from. Like I said, one of the biggest things about self-experimentation for me was that I was changeable, and this is something that I sort of figured out after going to a rationality workshop in California. After you view yourself as someone who is changeable, where a lot of your thoughts and behaviors are just arbitrary things you picked up over the years, there's this whole new landscape that you can enter and make improvements on.
Ulysse: And so in the beginning, I started just asking myself, what are things about me that are arbitrary or things that I can change? And then it sort of just grew into this more formal framework where I have outcomes I want, and I have methods to achieve those outcomes, and I have a lab notebook that I take notes in. And so I think being intentional about self-experimentation or personal research and development, which is what I call it sometimes, you have a much higher velocity. Yeah, I think trying different things to see what you like and what works is a really good way of approaching it.
Brendon: I really liked the concept of how a lot of us are in this current place where we're just following a predefined set of habits, of behaviors, of beliefs that we've accumulated over the years from a lot of different sources, could be parents, could be school, could be friends.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: It could be religion. Yeah, that's where we are, and I think viewing that all of the habits, actions, beliefs, mindsets, that you've accumulated over the years might not necessarily be optimal, is a very good way to view it because that means your life could be significantly better if you did explore alternative ways to go about doing things. Going back to my example from earlier where I mentioned going running in order to lose weight, there's actually one of the beliefs, at least in the nutrition realm of things is that losing weight might actually primarily be diet-driven rather than exercise driven. And so-
Ulysse: Totally. Totally.
Brendon: Self-experimentation is very important here because it's important to consider a set of methods that might be effective towards reaching a goal and track how well each of them is working in isolation.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: So for example, trying out how running works for a few weeks or a few months, and then if that is not necessarily having the desired effect or even if it is having the desired effect, you could then switch to trying to make different dietary modifications like intermittent fasting or cutting out a lot of processed foods and sugar or even doing caloric restriction or a paleo diet or whatever it is and see which of those changes actually is working for the longterm, both in terms of improving the metric that you're tracking, which might be weight in this case, as well as other quantitative and qualitative things like how you're feeling while on the diet, et cetera.
Ulysse: Right. You may not discover a universal truth about nutrition, but you could certainly discover a truth about yourself. Yeah. I think you've hit the nail on the head for how this pertains to experimentation, where you have to keep some things constant while you try to vary other things to figure out what works instead of having some combinatoric explosion of possibilities where you have to explore does intermittent fasting along with running make the best idea. Surely the body is really complex and maybe there are combinations of things that work better in synergy together than they work separately apart, but it's unlikely you'll find them by just trying them out randomly. I think doing them individually is probably the good approach.
Brendon: Yeah. There is this idea in the rationality movement to be aware of quote-unquote Other-optimizing, and that's looking at what other people are doing that seem like they're achieving success in a certain area, like a successful entrepreneur or an Olympic athlete, and just assuming that what they're doing to achieve the success in the area is what works and what will also work for you. And it's often the case that what other people are doing might not actually be optimal or might not actually work the best for yourself, and so self-experimentation is almost a necessary practice in order to find how you can personally optimize yourself-
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: Or how you can personally optimize different areas of your life.
Ulysse: Yeah. I like that idea of taking like best practices that are out there and then sort of trying them and customizing as needed.
Brendon: Earlier I touched on how self-experimentation can work for goals that can be tracked quantitatively, like weight, or even things like alleviating depression and increasing your levels of happiness. I think that you've done a lot of self-experimentation in the area of domains that may not be as quantitative.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: Like changing mindsets, changing beliefs. I'm curious what your thoughts on that are and also how you use self-experimentation to make progress on those more qualitative things.
Ulysse: Yeah. I think for me the most interesting results I've gotten out of self-experimentation have been changes in mindset. For example, I noticed that sometimes, I noticed that I got frustrated a lot when I was doing new things like learning to ski as an adult or just failing at new tasks in general. And then upon some introspection, I realized that I actually had the most to gain from these tasks because I was just so crappy at them, because I was basically at level zero. And so one of the experiments I set up was to try to turn that frustration into viewing it as an opportunity, and in my mind, this has been one of the biggest and most rewarding shifts in my mindset. There are so many things that I think I'm not good at, but this experiment, this behavior change has really led me to think differently, and definitely this one is hard to quantify.
Brendon: Reducing your aversion to learning and trying new things sounds really valuable. I'm curious how you use self-experimentation to achieve that result.
Ulysse: Yeah. I think the first thing that I did was just to notice it. Sometimes when you get angry or upset, you get into this tunnel vision where you're not thinking properly. And so I guess I just tried to notice that more. After I felt like I could reliably notice or reflect on when I had done this, I tried using this rationality technique called taps, which is basically when you try to have some automatic reaction to something that's going on in your life, whether it's touching something or hearing something or thinking about something or feeling a certain way. So for this experiment, I tried to set up in my mind whenever I felt this frustration, I would go “Aha!” and raise my finger as if a light bulb had just went off. And so this was sort of the second step. And so oftentimes I couldn't stop myself from being frustrated, but I think having this mentality allowed me to cope a lot better with frustrating situations and sort of plow through them easier.
Brendon: Cool. What does your personal system of self-experimentation look like?
Ulysse: I sort of mentioned some of the details before, but basically I maintain this list of experiment ideas, and then every week I choose a new one to do, so I write down the outcome that I want from that experiment and then try to think of how to do it. And so this sort of goes back to what you were saying about trying different things. There are a lot of different ways of establishing new behaviors, and generally I'll just pick one that I think is most likely to work. And then every week, as I'm conducting this experiment, I'll look at whatever notes I've taken on the experiment to decide if I need to change to a different method or tweak the existing method. Finally, after several weeks or a month or two months, I'll review the experiment and decide if I think it's basically arrived where I want it to be, or if I should just throw it out because it's just not working or maybe I can rework it completely, so that's sort of the system. At any given time, I have 40 to 60 full-time experiments, but only a few of them are new.
Brendon: That sounds really cool. Hearing about your system of self-experimentation actually makes me want to try to build out a more formalized system of my own. Right now, the way I sort of do self-experimentation is it's kind of embedded in a lot of different things that I do, but probably the most centralized version of what this looks like in my life is my habit spreadsheet. I use this habit spreadsheet from a company called Ultraworking.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: Which is called The Lights Sheet. And so basically you list out a long list of habits that you want to do every single day or every X number of days, and then check off whether or not you did it or not during any particular day.
Ulysse: Oh, yeah.
Brendon: And the goal isn't necessarily to achieve, do all of the habits every single day. Like it's sort of a don't break the chain sort of method, which is basically where you try to just do something for as long of a time as possible without not doing it. Instead, the system is more like the Ben Franklin approach to habits where I think he had listed out a few activities and behaviors that he wanted to maintain every single day and then monitored how well he was doing on those different areas of life. That's kind of what I do. And so basically if I want to run a new experiment in terms of like a recurring behavior I want to introduce into my life, what I will do is I will just add that into my habit spreadsheet, and then that spreadsheet contains a list of all the habits that I'm currently doing.
Brendon: And then I can see if I'm doing them or not, of course. Also reflect on how well new habits that I've added in and existing habits are working.
Ulysse: Right.
Brendon: And compare that against other qualitative and quantitative measures.
Ulysse: I remember you showed it to me one time. And one of the cool things about it is it's really easy to look at the spreadsheet and know, based on the colors of doing and not doing habits, how something's going. Right? It's like a really easy at-a-glance kind of mechanism.
Brendon: Yeah. And I touched on comparing my performance on actually doing habits with quantitative and qualitative measures.
Ulysse: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brendon: One of the things that I've recently started doing is tracking all of my time.
Ulysse: Wow.
Brendon: Like tracking what I'm doing the entire day. How much time I'm spending sleeping, how much I'm spending working, eating, all of these activities. And I found this amazing Mac app called Timing, which shows you what you were doing on your computer throughout the entire day. Like what websites you were on, what apps are being used. And so that allows me to retroactively look at the timeline and get really precise measurements for exactly what I'm doing. And the one key measure that I've been using from this is that the Timing app automatically calculates a productivity score for any given day.
Ulysse: Nice.
Brendon: I've marked certain things that I'm doing as either productive or not productive. And so every single day I get a percentage score that indicates how much time I actually spent working, basically.
Ulysse: Cool.
Brendon: And so then I can introduce new habits in my Light Sheet to try to be more productive or try to spend more time working on my most important work, and then I can look at timing. I can look at my daily percentage productivity score and see if the new behaviors I'm introducing are actually having a measurable effect on productivity.
Ulysse: Oh.
Brendon: And I can also try removing things and seeing if I just have like habits that aren't actually increasing my productivity.
Ulysse: Oh, wow. That's cool.
Brendon: Thanks, Ben.
Ulysse: I love that there's like a feedback loop. That's super cool.
Ulysse: Thanks for listening. Brendon and I only gave a cursory introduction to this topic. In the future, we hope to expand on it more with other specific examples. The show notes include links to all the research, ideas, and techniques we talked about in this episode. The beautiful intro music to this episode was created by Oliwia Orłowska. This relaxing melody is by Neighborhood Vandal. Links to both of these songs can be found in the show notes.
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