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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

An experiment of 1 person can very well produce useful data.

It depends on the setup of the experiment.

Imagine an experiment where a person's thumb gets randomly hit with either a hammer or a feather once per day. And they then subjectively rate the experience. After 1000 days of collecting data, I doubt that we would wrongly come to the conclusion that the hammer treatment leads to the nicer outcome.

The setup of the Theanine experiment which is the basis of this thread looks good on first sight. I have the feeling that the interpretation could use more thought though.

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Yes and no. The issue with a self-administered experiment is that becomes part of the experiment. Does the self-administration and the associated thoughts and beliefs affect the results? It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.

>It’s not like the experimentor can issue a placebo to themselves.

TFA describes a protocol for doing just that. The author randomly selected between the treatment dose and placebo. They didn't reveal the choice until after the effect should be complete so they could record the results.

A problem I see is that you can never be sure that it also works for other people. Just because one person reacts to a specific treatment does not mean that people on average react to the treatment in the same way. That’s the problem of having a sample size of 1. In other words: We cannot say much about whether the effect generalizes to a larger population from knowing that it has an affect on just one person.

It’s very possible that some things can be good for one person and not for another. Should we only ever have drugs that can help everyone?

A similar, actually useful, experiment is the one where a guy cracked the knuckles of only one hand for several years and found no ill effects from doing so compared to the other hand with non-cracked knuckles.

Then you find {imagining scenarios} that the bruising causes some effect that 'inoculates' against heart disease, or the feather carries a pathogen that later induces dementia??

What a weird take, in 99.999% of cases you don’t have such a black/white contrast

Sure. But even when you add noise to the described experiment, you get useful data.

That is the point I am making: Experiments of a single person can be useful.

The critics of single person experiments usually come up with examples vastly different than the Theanine experiment described here. With long term experiments which are only conducted once. But the Theanine experiment was looking for a short term effect and can be conducted many times. The hammer experiment I made up would be an extreme example of this type of experiment which leads itself well to be conducted by a single person.

What I am trying to point out is that if you are a skeptic, it would be better to try and find weaknesses in the experiment at hand. Not making up completely different experiments.

i hope your 1 person isn't a masochist

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