Show HN: A Platform For Self-Experimentation(doubleblinded.com) |
Show HN: A Platform For Self-Experimentation(doubleblinded.com) |
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/sidebar-whats-in-th...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/herbal-supplements...
Want to do a double-blind study on whether St. John's Wort improves your mood? None of the bottles tested from Walmart, Target, GNC or Walgreens actually contained any St. John's Wort in 2015. That's despite all the reports years earlier about the same problem. There's little reason to believe things have improved or will improve so long as supplements remain largely unregulated.
Also, since this is a double blinded trial, if there are significant differences between placebo and real powders then that affirms that the powder was real.
When I realized that, that was the end of ever considering buying supplements from almost all stores.
Whole Foods and similar types of stores are reliable. However, I still prefer researching and buying online. Analyzing comments, both good and bad, are very revealing and can sometimes give you an idea if it will work for you.
But now I just try to eat my veggies and so on. Diversification of food choices gives you a more solid spectrum of nutrients and some foods/nutrients amplify the effects of other nutrients.
So far it seems like most studies are done by scientists / academics in a very closed off kind of way, but the true nature of science is open to everyone and with the right platform we might be able to use normal people to gather enough data to confirm or deny our hypotheses in a way that's much more open than the standard study.
Essentially, anyone would be able to test their hypotheses and either help advance scientific knowledge or at least provide extremely interesting markers that could be used as a basis to get funding for more rigorous / controlled studies. This approach obviously won't work well for every kind of question but just as the OP has highlighted: it's particularly well-suited for making self-experimentation more rigorous and I imagine it would work well for the social sciences.
Imagine if we gave independent researchers like Gwern the tools they needed to help answer more questions. If it was designed right: it would also be an incredible learning tool for the scientific method (since you could participate in the experiments + propose new ones.)
Are there any platforms like this in existence, I wonder? U-Uber for science?
- quantifiedmind.com for self-testing your mind, which has a few group experiments as well. I'm looking into integrating with them as part of doubleblinded.com.
- PACO (by Google) https://www.pacoapp.com/ Pretty cool and flexible platform, although not the most user friendly or easy to figure out. It is open source and has an app, which is cool.
- A few sites like 23andme and ubiome have a lengthy list of survey questions they ask you, which I only imagine they would pass through pattern recognition algorthms to detect correlations between whatever information you give them and your Genome (or gut genome in the case of 23andme).
So yeah, there is stuff out there. We want to do this for nootropics and supplements (and eventually much more).
You guys might actually be some of the first researchers in the world to experiment with this kind of model. I can see this being very big if its marketed right.
"At the end of each day you will fill out a short survey with a few questions evaluating the effects of the pills."
Self-reporting is an unsuitable mechanism to draw out scientific results.
There's an excellent detailed explanation available (1) but in TL;DR here are four of the most compelling factors at work:
1 - Honesty/Image management
2 - Introspective ability
3 - Understanding / Question Interpretation
4 - Response bias
Take Image Management & Response Bias - participants know that they will be able to see their results vs. the control group and it's not a leap to realize how easily our ego and even subconscious need for validation could dramatically skew the full study results.
(1) http://www.sciencebrainwaves.com/the-dangers-of-self-report/
[1] http://www.hollandandbarrett.com/shop/product/holland-barret...
To make this useful, I think you need to do the following things:
1) Educate people on good practices generally. Your current site looks to me to be an invitation to be someone's guinea pig and pay for the privilege instead of being paid.
2) Offer doubleblinded kits for a wide variety of supplements that people can choose from. The one supplement you are currently offering is one I never heard of. So I don't care. But I might care if you offered me the chance to pick and choose from a list of supplements.
I am no longer taking supplements, but I did take a lot of supplements at one time. I can see a service like this having a use for people, but not in its current format.
Also, I would remove the phrase "self experimentation." That sounds incredibly Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde to me. "Self testing" might be okay, but that's a terrible phrase and should be stricken from company vocabulary.
As far as the supplements go, I agree with that as well. We're planning on adding more once the L-Theanine trial is sorted out. This is just our practice round to get the protocol right. What other supplements would you be curious to see?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3p0y2x/crowdfun...
https://www.123-reg.co.uk/order/domain?X-CSRF-Token=45b50019...
That doesn't seem very trustworthy
And yes, we plan on including food at a later date!
Cocoa seems to have made me two years younger.
The poster I presented is at
http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media...
Regardless, users can be prompted to perform any software action (knowingly or unknowingly, to affect bias) and that action can be measured by the system. It may so happen that every critical measurement occurs unbeknownst to the user, before they self-report anything (if at all). As we are currently undergoing a period of sensor-proliferation (fitness/health devices, wearables, internet of things, etc...) it's not unrealistic to think we will soon be able to instantly correlate data from a smartphone camera, blood/tissue, and the cloud.
Now there's always the problem of intentional fraud/deception, but I think the aggregate nature solves that problem. A small percentage will try to "break" the system, and that small percentage will never surpass a critical threshold with enough volume. In terms of ML/SVM's, we're now very good about filtering outliers or "misrepresented data"... while the responsibility is on you to develop a reliable classifier (for data-consistency more than arbitrary measurement), I imagine at scale you could infer trends with the same relative accuracy of traditional academia and research.
It's a really fascinating new direction--even if only an adjunct to traditional research--and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the project.
Even with the bias of self reporting, differences between real and placebo will still be meaningful. You can't entirely deceive yourself if you don't know what you just took.
Also, there is some degree of honesty required for this experiment. If someone really wanted to, they could open up the pills and taste them to see if it's placebo or not. They could also intentionally lie. But the goal here is to learn about yourself through experimentation, so I expect most people that participate to have some level of desire for truth and honesty. I would also argue that while these biases do exist, even large randomized clinical trials have the same pitfalls, so we are not necessarily worse off than what's already out there.
