Mini Blog Post 1: The value of experiments
An incredibly useful way to improve the way that I’m living my life is to run experiments on myself. Where by “experiment”, I mean to explicitly change something about how I live my life, follow this plan for some period of time, and then explicitly track how it went, and what I learned from this. For example, writing a mini blog post every day for two weeks, to see what it’s like to be less of a perfectionist! Or, to see if coworking could make me more productive, sign up for a focusmate.com account and try a few sessions. Or see if exercise can improve my mental health, by ensuring I go to the gym every Sunday morning for the next month, and recording how I feel on Sunday afternoon.
The underlying model here, is that there are a lot of ways I can be living my life. I am currently following a particular path, approach and routine. And I think this is a pretty good one! But it’s clearly far from optimal - I can tell because there are a bunch of ways my life is better now than it was a year ago, and it’s such a high-dimensional space that there’s no way I’ve actually found the perfect point. Naively, I might try to improve things by just thinking hard about what could be better, and I think this can be a great approach! But there are often things that surprise me about the world, and things are often not as I expect them. So actually doing something, trying new things, and gathering data, is a really powerful way of finding the things that I’m missing.
And experiments are particularly interesting, because the upside risk is high and the downside risk (if you’re sensible about things) is low. Because what you’re really getting is information. If I try 10 new restaurants, and hate 9 of them, that’s 9 bad meals. But I can go to the one awesome restaurant 100 times, now that I know it’s great! This is the general idea of exploring, rather than exploiting. And I think especially when you’re young (as I assume most everyone reading this is), the value of exploring massively outweighs the risk of doing something sub-optimal.
Honestly, the above all feels pretty obvious - experiments and trying new things are useful, and I could probably have just jumped in with that assertion. Just doing a rough Fermi Estimate suggests that an experiment that eg makes me 1% more productive or 1% happier is an insanely good use of time.
And yet, I don’t really run experiments… And this is something I’m currently trying to change, and making progress on! (and a very fun things to run experiments with ;) ) But something where I have a lot of room to improve
The internal experience is approximately: it’s not that I explicitly consider experiments, and decide not to run them. It’s that running an experiment doesn’t feel like the default action. It never feels urgent, it never feels like my highest priority, even if the idea does pop into my head. I think it’s that the benefits of experiments are all about getting information, and future long-run benefits. And my intuitions are far too focused on the short-term, on novelty, and the things that feel exciting. And they neglect the fact that this is a really powerful way to improve my life in the long-term.
The main way I’ve found of dealing with this: Framing experiments as exciting, as something novel. And setting up systems so I think about this regularly. I currently have 2 hours a week to skim through the list of problems in my life, and an algorithm for designing new experiments, and this has notably increased the amount that I run! Social accountability, talking to friends and coaches, is also really helpful for this. It makes it stick better, and feel closer to a default action.
