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CasioTheSane comments on Value of Information: 8 examples - Less Wrong
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I look forward to your results.
Thanks. The experiment starts today. I made up 14 pills and randomized them with R code, under the assumption that I couldn't possibly subconsciously track each pill and then remember their locations. In hindsight, this is probably more labor intensive and error prone than the method you used to randomize your adderall...
I start with a 14 tray pill box with treatment (0.75mg melatonin + parsely) in the first 7 boxes, and placebo (parsely pills only) in the last 7. I randomly reorder them 3 times, according to each of the lists outputted by my code, and it writes the final pill locations to a text file.
Here's my R code for randomizing "single blind" placebo controlled self-trials:
sampleSize <- 14
intialSetup <- c(rep("treatment", sampleSize/2), rep("placebo", sampleSize/2))
reorder1 <- sample(1:sampleSize, sampleSize, replace = FALSE)
reorder2 <- sample(1:sampleSize, sampleSize, replace = FALSE)
reorder3 <- sample(1:sampleSize, sampleSize, replace = FALSE)
final <- intialSetup[reorder1][reorder2][reorder3]
write.table(final, "final.txt")
paste(reorder1, "->", 1:sampleSize)
paste(reorder2, "->", 1:sampleSize)
paste(reorder3, "->", 1:sampleSize)
Interesting procedure. I'd agree it's probably much more work than some simple physical procedure. (I'd also point out that 14 pairs won't give you much significance - my above power analysis suggested that for awakenings, anyway, you'd want more like 140 pairs. But I should be happy you're actually doing the experiment.)
I plan to do much more than 14, but it was very tedious to set up so I started with that. I need to streamline the procedure.
How has the experiment been going?
Hey gwern, as you predicted I didn't have enough data to learn anything... and I didn't have time to do it longer. I considered repeating it, but now I'm scared off melatonin until I learn more about how it works. Dr. Ray Peat theorizes that it might have some negative health effects by inhibiting oxidative metabolism:
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=005233684413389937395%3Ad5qfhqsz7oo&ie=UTF-8&q=melatonin#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=melatonin&gsc.page=1
Also, anecdotally I don't really see a huge benefit to melatonin. Even small doses (0.75mg) seem to make me slightly groggy when I wake 7.5 hours later. I may have unusually slow melatonin metabolism, as I have the "slow caffeine metabolizer" P450 CYP1A2 variant, the same enzyme responsible for clearing melatonin.