Seth's Blog

The First Quantified Self Conference happened last weekend in Mountain View. It resembled a super-duper QS meetup: more talks, more varieties of expression (short talks, long talks, booths, posters, breakout sessions, panels), people from far-flung places, such as Switzerland, and more friends.

Above all, it felt sunny, after a long overcast. Something I’d done most of my life was now enthusiastically being done by many others. (more…)

“Why does personal science matter?” is the title of my talk at the First Quantified Self Conference, which I gave two days ago. My answer to that question is personal scientists are more likely to make useful discoveries than professional scientists. Relative to professional scientists, personal scientists have two big disadvantages (less resources, less knowledge) and three big advantages (more time, more freedom, and more desire to be useful). Over the last half-century, the disadvantages have been getting smaller — the personal scientists have been catching up — causing them to overall move ahead of (= have a greater likelihood of making useful discoveries than) professional scientists.

The data behind this answer fall into two groups: (a) the profound stagnation in health care and, by contrast, (b) innovation from personal scientists. A self-serving example is obesity. Mainstream treatments for obesity are ancient. The “eat less, move more” advice was common in the 1950s. Low-fat diets became popular starting in the 1960s. The first popular low-carb diet was introduced in 1864. In contrast, the Shangri-La Diet is based on new ideas. It took far longer to develop (about 15 years) than any professional weight-control researcher would have time for.

I worked harder on this talk than any talk I have ever given. I gave a kind of rough draft a month ago and more recently I practiced it three times. After that I tried to memorize a few sections, such as the beginning and the end. The feedback has been the best I’ve gotten for any talk I’ve given so the whole thing has been great. I feel strongly about the overall message, which I don’t think is obvious, especially to me. It took me a very long time to have a good answer to why I was finding useful stuff (about acne, weight, sleep, and mood, for example) that the experts didn’t know.

Over at the SLD forums, Newbie Numpty has lost about 50 pounds in four months. His starting weight was 320 pounds. Recently he reported:

My wife tells me that I have stopped snoring – this is something I’ve done for years (decades) so it could actually mean that I am now at a lower body fat that I have been for a number of years – no way to tell. But a great thing for sleep quality – I’ve spent money on nose strips and mandibular extension devices to help with this, SLD is again a cheaper fix!

I am at the First Quantified Self Conference in Mountain View. The attendees are much more relaxed and cheerful than at the academic conferences I’ve attended, presumably because they chose to come. Some are from Europe. My overall take is that the conference’s theme is the romance of tracking, in the sense that the typical presentation is something like: isn’t it wonderful that I’m measuring this? Or hypothetical. (Of course, the research presented at typical academic conferences is almost never shown to have practical value.) I think this is entirely reasonable. In my experience, it is very hard to learn something clearly useful and takes a long time. For example, I measured my sleep for about 10 years before figuring out how to improve it.

Sean Ahren‘s presentation was one of the best I heard, and illustrated the difficulty. He has Crohn’s Disease. He wondered if hookworms would help. Day by day, he measured how much pain he felt, and for some of the time took hookworms. There was no clear difference between the two periods (with and without hookworms). He learned plenty of useful stuff — how easy/difficult it was to do the measurements, what the data look like, the apparent ineffectiveness of one brand of hookworms –  but when contrasted with the goal of learning how to reduce pain from Crohn’s, it doesn’t seem like  much. Perhaps the average Crohn’s sufferer would say it’s great you’re doing this but think how does this help me? I think his observations lasted about 8 months. Perhaps if he continues for 6 years, by then the amount of learning will be larger and more tangible. Overall it’s a good example of the way scientific progress and job don’t mix well. When you have a job, you make tangible progress quickly: you fill someone’s order, for example. They wanted something, you gave it to them. Tangible. Whereas trying to clearly improve one’s Crohn’s Disease might take ten years. Too long if your motivation is connected to making a living. Too long for professional scientists.

At a breakout session on sleep experiments, I learned that someone had great success wearing blue-blocking glasses (which look orange) after 9 pm. Something I want to try. I’ve heard about these glasses before but these results were especially impressive. The glasses quickly reduced how long it took him to fall asleep. Someone else was told he had sleep apnea. But when his acid reflux got better, so did his sleep.

You can read about many talks, including mine, in great detail at Ethan Zuckerman’s blog.

• Dennis Mangan makes great progress against chronic fatigue syndrome
• More Dennis Mangan: statin dangers.
• Statins fail to save lives. “Statin therapy for an average period of 3.7 years had no benefit on all-cause mortality in a high-risk primary prevention population.” About 60,000 subjects were involved.
• Probiotic tested with cyclists. The men benefited (less sickness), the women did not.