Self-Experimentation And Leisure

“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade

I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat.  She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.

Seth Roberts is dead.  I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014.  He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley.  Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.

What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself.  He even wrote a paper about it (LINK).  It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood.  I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.

In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.

Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.

The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:

Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire.  Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.  In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things.  He noted that these included:

  • Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it.  Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
  • Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
  • Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things.  I think the BLM® riots might count here.

I can’t wait for their final show.  Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?

Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way.  The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.

It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up.  He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians.  They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world.  Darn it for those guys.  And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.

I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.

Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials.  It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him.  He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself.  He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously.  Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter?  Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.

Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life.  To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall.  To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment.  And most of them have worked well.  20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep.  Now?  I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.

Someone asked me what my dream job was.  “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”

How long did that take?  Years.  An experiment here that worked.  An experiment that didn’t.  I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep.  I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby.  It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow?  Is it a blanket?  No, it’s Slumberman™.

My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful.  For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.

This was a 100% solution.  Every time, it worked.  No theory.  No real reason.  And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter.  Why doesn’t it matter?  I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.

Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems.  And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.

People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.

But most of my life is in my hands.  I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are.  If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.

So, is self-experimentation good?  Yeah, mostly.  I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

30 thoughts on “Self-Experimentation And Leisure”

  1. When Ivan sees Harpy Daniels and the View, he will surrender!
    Gnostic science and Gaia will be the new false world religion.
    Stick around and enjoy the Sodom and Gomorrah action.
    Don’t look back and make sure its from a safe distance.
    I self experimented last weekend, burned my hand and then went back to leisure.
    O/T-The huge stack of Buttwiper Light at the store was good for a laugh.
    They started the use by date on the can and now it bites them in the ass.

  3. Ah, scientific research, is there nothing you cannot discover? My favorite example of self-experimentation is Dr. Charles Unger, who cracked his knuckles on one hand and not the other to see if knuckle cracking causes arthritis…

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crack-research/

    … for which he won the coveted 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine…

    https://improbable.com/ig/winners

    I apologize for the Scientific American link above. SA has prostituted itself into irrelevance over the decades by pandering to a lower and lower intellectual level. When I was in high school and college, it was THE high-brow place to find an introduction to some esoteric scientific topic via an overview written by an expert. Plus it had The Amateur Scientist column every month.

    Now, SA has gone Woke with a capital W and has published non-stop, practically monthly transgender agitprop for the past couple of years (I’ll spare you the links, Google “scientific american transgender” if you wanna go down the rabbit hole) culminating with this in their “opinion” (!?!?!?!) column four days ago:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/

    There’s been a lot of pushback and moaning on the crash dive into the dirt SA has taken, but whattayagonnado?

    I will note that if anybody is into self-research science projects these days, it’s the transgenders.

    But getting back to Dr. Unger, I am thankful for the comfort I have from his self-research. I too am a knuckle popper, and in the past year or so I have lost the ability to pop the knuckles in my left hand as mild arthritis sets in. Thanks to Dr. Unger I don’t have to worry that I have somehow mutilated myself, and I can just accept myself for what I am.

    I hope that our current descent into LBTBQIXYZ+ madness will someday abate so that a multitude of Gen Zers will be able to say the same.

      1. I knew about Gardner’s stuff – didn’t know about the Amateur Scientist. Thanks!

    3. Single worst article, ever, in SA. Wow. They’re buying in, lock, stock and barrel with The Narrative.

  4. John, I may love your Friday wanderings most of all.

    1) College Professors: I had some good ones and lots of mediocre ones and only a few truly bad ones. But to your note, the industry (and that is what it is) has changed in the past 120 odd years from professors educating and doing research to writing papers and presenting at conferences and finding graduate students to do the teaching. The other error this has pulled us into is the concept that ONLY the educated can make advances in any field of knowledge unlike earlier times, where amateurs and the interested could do so. It still happens occasionally – the final battlefield of the Battle of the Teutoburg Wald (9 A.D.) was discovered by an amateur who enjoyed metal detection where it had eluded archaeologists up to that time.

    2) Self-experimentation makes a ton of sense as we are all unique, mentally and physically and what works for you may very well not work for me – for example, I have a narrow window that I can fall asleep and get up feeling rested the next days (it looks a lot like between 2200 and 2230). Just as long as we rule out the really universal stuff like “Flying from the Roof with my Arms” and self medication experiments.

    1. Thank you! They’re fun to write.

      And in some ways (especially mentally) the variance in the brain of even people with the same I.Q. is amazing.

  6. Every day’s an experiment; enjoy it. As for Veblen, took an elective during my MBA stint – “History Of Economic Theory”. Had to write a paper, so decided on exploring his works. Boring. Bitter.

    A Karen in his Minnesnowtan time, early 1900s. You betcha.

    1. So, you’re saying I read about the right amount of Veblen, which is a sentence or two?

  7. Jeez, JW. You boast about finding the secret to falling asleep within 2 minutes anywhere, anytime, and then you don’t even give a hint as to what it was that worked for you?!? Insomnia is one of the worst scourges of modern times. I, for one, would gladly kill for a solution that does not involve a medicine cabinet full of pills.

    Dirty pool, old man.

      1. Forget about all the ‘relax your toes, relax your ankle, relax your knees, blah blah blah.
        Inhale through the nose to the count of 7, hold for the count of 4, exhale out of the mouth to the count of 10. Repeat 3 times and then just relax and breathe normally.

        Oh and one more thing, regular exercise every day also helps immensely in feeling better and sleeping better as well. One does not need to go to the gym for this exercise, a longish walk of half an hour or so is better than sitting on the couch in front of the ‘you know what’. 🙂

      2. Here it is . . .
        First, get in bed, though a chair will do. 😊
        Second, get in a neutral position, where you can stay without using muscle, and isn’t cramping you.
        Third, don’t move. At all. If I move, I restart from here.
        Fourth, breathe as deep as I can, release slowly. Seven count? Repeat this three times.
        Fifth, start counting down from 100. If my mind starts wandering (which happens near sleep and generally near the count of 92), I restart, but add 100, so the second time I start from 200. Third time, three hundred. Rarely do I get to a third time, and my record is four times. Typically, I time the counts with my breath. Usually, I’m asleep by the time I hit 92. (or 192, or 292).

    2. Okay, here it is. I’ll repost it to everyone that asked . . .
      First, get in bed, though a chair will do. 😊
      Second, get in a neutral position, where you can stay without using muscle, and isn’t cramping you.
      Third, don’t move. At all. If I move, I restart from here.
      Fourth, breathe as deep as I can, release slowly. Seven count? Repeat this three times.
      Fifth, start counting down from 100. If my mind starts wandering (which happens near sleep and generally near the count of 92), I restart, but add 100, so the second time I start from 200. Third time, three hundred. Rarely do I get to a third time, and my record is four times. Typically, I time the counts with my breath. Usually, I’m asleep by the time I hit 92. (or 192, or 292).

  8. I have trouble hearing, but I’ve heard that newish term ‘manspleening’, but never ‘dogspleening’.

  9. Ol Seth died of a heart attack at a fairly young age while out for a walk. He was known for eating a stick of butter daily.

  10. Tried the 7-4-10 sleep methodology. No dice.

    I’ll stick to excessive amounts of Tito’s with club soda & lime.

  11. It occurs to me that the very rich getting REALLY obvious plastic surgery fits with the activities listed too. There has to be some reason for them to look like cats beyond “she did it”.
    n

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