Tyler Cowen on self-experimentation
Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler talks up Seth Roberts and the importance of self-experimentation.
When Oh When will people appreciate how deep Seth Roberts’s self-experimentation concept runs? Descartes started with the idea that we know only ourselves, Seth realizes that the self is often the last thing we know and discovering the self is the highest stage of science not to mention performance art. The innovation of hermeneutics (as found say, in Paul Riceour) was to set the self apart from the social world and trace the implications of a dualistic and indeed interpretative social science. Seth reestablishes methodological monism by turning the world-self distinction on its head, relocating the self in the world of science. Add to that mix a working knowledge of experimental psychology, insights from neurodiversity (the meticulous recording of self, the focus on detail, plus the deeply autistic speak of the self in the third person as an external object to be observed; are they so wrong?), and sugared water, for a potent mix.
Increasingly, I think that self-experimentation and ethnography have a lot in common. There is just so much we can learn from anthropology.
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