It's worth using Laplace's Rule of Succession, so something that worked for 3/3 people would be listed as 80% instead of 100%.

I like this approach because it follows the approach of Taking the Obvious Advice, and because of its focus on operationalising rationality rather than seeking insight porn.

As a short-term solution, would a Google Sheet work? I believe that you could then use a Google Form to populate the sheet. Here's your example data in a spreadsheet.

I will return to this thread on December 11, 2017 to see if anyone else has subscribed to this project. I'm unable to commit any time prior to that date.

Hi there,

Me and the folks over at FortForecast have actually been building something adjacent to this. It's a preregistration database for LW Diaspora projects and experiments. Bendini's original proposal for it looked a lot like your proposed cookbook, and since it actually has no application-specific parts in it we could totally make another form for personal outcomes on things like weight loss techniques.

If you'd be interested in that at all, email me at jd@fortforecast.com

Re: "Any coders that would like to jump into this?"

I hope it's okay to pitch my own startup for this: https://bubble.is

We make a tool to let non-programmers build things like this kind of project. Think SquareSpace for web applications with real, custom logic. We're accessible to anyone with enough computer skills to, for example, build formulas in excel.

I started Bubble precisely because I had a bunch of ideas for similar things -- collaboration sites, smart todos lists, etc. -- and even as an experienced programmer, I found that the effort of building each one was deterring me from experimenting. I wanted something that would let me do something like this in 30 minutes instead of a week or two.

I'd call it a solid success: we use Bubble to build all our own internal tools, of course, and we recently built a lightweight JIRA knock-off for project management with v1 finished in an hour, and probably 3 - 4 more hours of ongoing refinements.

Beyond my own selfish interest in seeing the business take off, I'd love to see more awareness of Bubble in the rationalist community, because I think it's a great fit: a lot of people experimenting ideas for improving discourse / thinking / knowledge-sharing, with a high-ratio of technically-inclined people, but not necessarily too many people who could develop applications like this full time. A lot of making these kinds of experiments work is having a low cost of trying them, so I think more adoption could lead to a bunch of cool things happening.

See curetogether.com - it seems like that would be what you want if they changed their categories a bit.

For example, let's imagine that melatonin is effective for 60% of all people: 80% of people who describe themselves as "morning people", but only 40% of people who do not. This is useful melaton

I think that an important addition would be other data about the participants in a given intervention, that could ideally help newcomers filter out interventions which are reasonably likely to have a positive effect in the general population but unlikely to apply to some subset of people.I think that an important addition would be other data about the participants in a given intervention, that could ideally help newcomers filter out interventions which are reasonably likely to have a positive effect in the general population but unlikely to apply to some subset of people.I think that an important addition would be other data about the participants in a given intervention, that could ideally help newcomers filter out interventions which are reasonably likely to have a positive effect in the general population but unlikely to apply to some subset of people.I think that an important addition would be other data about the participants in a given intervention, that could ideally help newcomers filter out interventions which are reasonably likely to have a positive effect in the general population but unlikely to apply to some subset of people.

For example, let's imagine that melatonin is effective for 60% of all people: 80% of people who describe themselves as "morning people", but only 40% of people who do not. This is useful information for both groups (assuming the difference is statistically significant), and would be lovely to include in our cookbook.

This would require more information-gathering about individual users (and we should definitely have a "decline to disclose" option, particularly for more sensitive topics). If we want to be able to change what data we are collecting later (imagine that we suddenly have reason to believe that hair color is relevant to melatonin impact), we will need to store individual usernames in order to contact participants later.

I would be interested in helping with this project. My employer currently owns anything software-related I produce, but is willing to make reasonable exceptions where a project does not intersect with its business; if this project does materialize in a more concrete form, I would be able to present it to my employer and ask for permission to contribute. So if someone starts it, I would like to support it.

For example, let's imagine that melatonin is effective for 60% of all people: 80% of people who describe themselves as "morning people", but only 40% of people who do not. This is useful information for both groups (assuming the difference is statistically significant), and would be lovely to include in our cookbook.

This would require more information-gathering about individual users (and we should definitely have a "decline to disclose" option, particularly for more sensitive topics). If we want to be able to change what data we are collecting later (imagine that we suddenly have reason to believe that hair color is relevant to melatonin impact), we will need to store individual usernames in order to contact participants later.

This is an interesting idea but I think something like it already exists: http://curetogether.com/conditions

I think curetogether is a good start, but really would like a much bigger list of problems/benefits/interventions, plus expected costs of trying each one.

edit: whoops, thought you were AndHisHorse, although they are also welcome to contact me if interested in craft rationality