summer reading bleg

So, i haven’t posted here in seemingly forever (and it seems that each of my last few posts start off with a similar preamble), but I have a query, and figured why not send it out to the ole world wide web to see if i get any nibbles.

The following is a list of a chunk of the books i was aiming to (re-)read this summer  (those i brought with me on my first stint away from home anyway). You’ll likely notice a strong theme given my full(er) investment in an ongoing sociology of science project on the structuring of problem-based interdisciplinary fields (but there are a smattering of others that I’ve merely wanted to read and/or revisit for a while).

The request is simple – if there’s one (or even better, more) books on this list that you happen to be tackling this summer as well and you’d be up for throwing a few ideas back and forth via email/phone/skype/whatever, give me a shout.

Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts is an interesting psychologist.  He seems to have built up quite a following from non-academics, as well as academics, due to self-experimentation.

Seth notes self-experimentation has several advantages over mainstream academic approaches. 1) Time: the self-experimenter doesn’t have to deal with coordinating with lots of people so she can rapidly and easily perform one experiment after another.   2) Freedom: the self-experimenter has freedom to study whatever she wants.  and 3) Motivation: the self-experimenter has more reason to study something that matters and get the answer right.

Seth has used self-experimentation to develop a novel approach to weight loss, and a number of other simple interventions for health and well-being.  I won’t vouch for each one, but I do think we could all benefit from introducing a pit more systematic self-experimentation in our lives.

See Seth’s more academic writeups here and here, blog writeups here, and here.  Log your own experiment here.