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gwern comments on What are you working on? April 2012 - Less Wrong
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A couple of months ago I started keeping a journal. I posted about it here, asking for recommendations, and vaguely outlining my plan. (TLDR for that post: I'm writing a traditional journal when I have the time and keeping track of activities and emotional levels in a spreadsheet everyday, since that only takes like a minute.) It's gone very well. Originally I envisioned the journal as being a far more important part, but I'm enjoying the data collection much more. (Though both are valuable and I encourage both) I've recently made the tools for actually analyzing the data I've collected, and I thought I'd make the template publicly available for anyone who wanted to try a similar project. If you are, please send me a message or comment, and I'd be happy to explain the spreadsheet in more detail, since I know it can be hard to follow. But I don't want to take the time to write this if no one is going to use it.
Surprisingly, I have found very few statistically significant correlations. For example, there is not yet any statistically significant correlation (p<0.05) between how much sleep I've gotten and how energetic I feel the next day. R-squared values for linear regressions of variables tend to be around 2%-7%, even for variables that I thought would correlate very highly. Surprisingly, what is most strongly predictive (of the things I've looked at) of my happiness is how much exercise I have gotten that day (even more so than how much I have eaten).
I feel like this is mostly because I need a lot more data. There are trends that are evident in most of my things, but they're just not statistically significant yet. I really want to have about 4-5 more months of data, and then I feel like I can make some strong conclusions. I hope I'm not coming back in another 4-5 months wanting another 4-5 months though...
Edit: Apparently I am more energetic (Significant at alpha = 0.05) when I eat more than average than less than average. I must not have looked at food eaten vs energy before. I thought I had. There's an R-squared of 21%, which is astonishingly high comparatively.
I don't think that'd be much of a surprise if you read much literature on exercise - exercise improving mood & cognition is a pretty common result.
Or vice versa? (I feel very hungry on modafinil - does hunger cause me to use modafinil?)
You do? It's supposed to have the typical appetite-suppressing properties that most stimulants share.
Yes, that's the problem - my appetite is initially suppressed and then I wind up incredibly hungry. I try to eat in advance (from my nightwatch days I know how much I should eat by 3 AM etc), but again, appetite suppressant.
That makes sense. And given how degree of hunger influences what kind of food we desire you'll end up craving a bunch of carbohydrates later rather than whatever healthy food you had planned at the meal times.
FWIW, I feel pretty hungry on modafinil, too. But that's maybe caused by sleep-deprivation which is correlated with modafinil-consumption.
I knew of the literature you mention (well, not the specific literature, but that's not the point) - which is precisely what caused me to look at it - but I thought other factors would still be more correlative. I would have thought sleep, stress, recreation time, or social time would be more predictive. But those barely correlate.
I quite intentionally didn't say one caused the other. But I wouldn't expect the primary causality to flow from energy to eating, as opposed to from eating to energy. (Or, yes, from a common third cause)