Personal Science

Personal Science

Learning to Observe

About the Book

Thank you for considering buying our book, Personal Science: Learning to Observe.

The book presents a step-by-step approach to exploring your personal questions with empirical methods.

It contains no advice whatsoever on what treatments or medicines or diets or vitamins or exercises are worth trying. Instead, it offers meta-advice; that is, advice on how to know if the things that you try actually work the way you expect, and advice about how to develop reasonable new ideas of things to try.

The goal of releasing this LeanPub version is to get the almost competed draft into the hands of people in the Quantified Self community and others who are keenly interested in the topic, so we can hear about what we may have gotten wrong and fix it. There is a minimum price of $8, and the entire purchase price will be devoted to maintaining self-research community resources, such as the show&tell archive at quantifiedself.com.

To comment, join the Personal Science Book discussion at forum.quantifiedself.com, send an email to gary@quantifiedself.com, or tweet at @quantifiedself.

We appreciate your support!

Reader Testimonials

Susannah Fox
Susannah Fox

I help people navigate health and technology.

It’s incredibly useful. As I look across the spectrum of what is possible - probable - inevitable in health, personal science is ESSENTIAL to all of it This is the guide that will help make it all happen

Table of Contents

  • Version Note (April 2022)
  • Preface
  • Personal Science
    • Perception, Memory, and Computing
    • A Personal Question
    • Validity of Personal Science
    • The Personal Science Cycle
  • Questioning
    • Time Series
    • Experience
    • Stance
    • Log
  • Observing
    • Phenomena
    • Proxies
    • Features
    • Incidents
    • Foreground & Background
    • Scales
    • Triggers
    • Prompts
    • Instruments
    • Cadence
    • Collection
    • Data
  • Reasoning
    • Argument
    • Inspection
    • Matching
    • Trials
    • Patterns
  • Discovering
    • Show&Tell
    • Collective Knowledge
  • Resolution
  • About the Authors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub