Will Eating Half a Stick of Butter a Day Make You Smarter?
Posted Oct 14 2010 12:00am
To my pleasant surprise, Mark Frauenfelder posted this call for volunteers . Will eating half a stick of butter per day or a similar amount of coconut fat improve your performance on arithmetic problems? Eri Gentry is organizing a simple trial to find out. The trial is inspired by my recent Quantified Self talk . Study details .
During the question period of my talk, I responded to a question about a trial with 100 volunteers by saying I would suggest starting with 2 volunteers. A reader has written to ask why.
What’s your reasoning behind suggesting only 2 volunteers to test the eating more butter results? You seem highly convinced earlier in the video, but if you were so convinced why not have a larger trial?
Because the trial will be harder than the people running it expect. If you’re going to make mistakes, make small ones.
This is my first rule of science: Do less. A grad student in English once told me that a little Derrida goes a long way and a lot of Derrida goes a little way. Same with data collection. A little goes a long way and a lot goes a little way. A tiny amount of data collection will teach you more than you expect. A large amount will teach you less.
My entire history of self-experimentation started with a small amount of data collection: An experiment about the effectiveness of an acne medicine. It was far more informative than I expected. My doctor was wrong, I was wrong and it had been so easy to find out.
This may sound like I am criticizing Eri’s study. I’m not. What’s important is to do something, however flawed, that can tell you something you didn’t know. Maybe that should be the first rule, or the zeroth rule. It has the pleasant and unusual property of being easier than you might think.
To my pleasant surprise, Mark Frauenfelder posted this call for volunteers . Will eating half a stick of butter per day or a similar amount of coconut fat improve your performance on arithmetic problems? Eri Gentry is organizing a simple trial to find out. The trial is inspired by my recent Quantified Self talk . Study details .
During the question period of my talk, I responded to a question about a trial with 100 volunteers by saying I would suggest starting with 2 volunteers. A reader has written to ask why.
Because the trial will be harder than the people running it expect. If you’re going to make mistakes, make small ones.
This is my first rule of science: Do less. A grad student in English once told me that a little Derrida goes a long way and a lot of Derrida goes a little way. Same with data collection. A little goes a long way and a lot goes a little way. A tiny amount of data collection will teach you more than you expect. A large amount will teach you less.
My entire history of self-experimentation started with a small amount of data collection: An experiment about the effectiveness of an acne medicine. It was far more informative than I expected. My doctor was wrong, I was wrong and it had been so easy to find out.
This may sound like I am criticizing Eri’s study. I’m not. What’s important is to do something, however flawed, that can tell you something you didn’t know. Maybe that should be the first rule, or the zeroth rule. It has the pleasant and unusual property of being easier than you might think.
Thanks to Carl Willat.