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Thursday
Mar312011

"One of my goals is to catalyze an army of good self-experimenters"

One of my goals is to catalyze an army of good self-experimenters; part of my job is therefore to train readers to do their own homework. Richard Feynman famously remarked, "It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong."

Tim Ferriss in his Wired interview Tim Ferriss Wants to Hack Your Body.

Of course I love this quote, which expresses something Ferriss and I have this in common. His approach is through doing extreme experiments on himself, then sharing them compellingly and controversially with an large, receptive audience that's he's fostered. He's done a ton of good in promiting an experiment-driven life.

My approach is through developing and sharing the wider philosophy (I call it Think, Try, Learn) and creating tools that make it easy for anyone to create, track, and learn from their experiments, and help others with theirs. With the recent Edison features of quantified data and group experiments, the tool now has enough in place for me to figure out how well it does this.

Reader Comments (1)

self experimentation is a realm a lot of people don't like to go through. When you don't get the results you want, you tend to get frustrated and throw in the towel. But so much good an accidental success happened with self experimentation

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