Why is self-experimentation effective?
Seth Roberts has a new paper trying to explain the “unreasonable effectiveness” of his self-experimentations efforts. To me it’s more evidence of the rise of the amateur.
The puzzle began in graduate school, where I studied experimental psychology. To learn how to do experiments, I tried to do as many as possible. At the time I had acne. It was easy to measure (count pimples each morning) so I decided to do experiments about it. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. A few months of self-experimentation showed that tetracycline did not work, which surprised my dermatologist. Later conventional research found that tetracycline often fails. My dermatologist had years of experience. Yet a little self-experimentation by a non-expert found something important that he and other dermatologists did not know.
Unconstrained by groupthink, the need to signal status, or professional regulations, non-expertscan more easily think outside the box.
