What Is the Best Way to Measure Life Experiments?

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With life experiments, often what I'm looking for is like, does this help me in such an obvious way that I'm really confident it worked? There are some exceptions to that. For example, if someone starts taking an antidepressant, like let's because they're experiencing depression or anxiety, I actually highly recommend that for every week they take a standardized anxiety and depression scale. If you're at that level, then like don't do it unless you enjoy it, right?

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Why should we not optimize some things in life? Should some things (e.g., interpersonal relationships) be "off-limits" for optimization? How much time spent being unproductive is good for us? What can we learn by paying attention to our moods? Does science make progress and produce knowledge too slowly? Why is research methodology applied so inconsistently, especially in the social sciences?

Christie Aschwanden is author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, and co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She's the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian, Popular Science, New Scientist, Discover, Science, and NPR.org. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and has received journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Carter Center, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Greater Good Science Center. Learn more about her at christieaschwanden.com or follow her on Instagram at @cragcrest or on Mastodon at @cragscrest.

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