Interesting project! It reminds me a bit of Huberman lab, the existence and apparent popularity of which could be taken as an argument in favor of ESH to be worthwhile (although format, target audience and focus might of course differ quite a bit).
One thing I personally find very interesting is the point you mentioned as a counter argument: “Individual differences in benefit significantly outweigh the general differences in value between interventions”—in my opinion, this could even be viewed as quite the opposite: my impression is that in most easily digestible sources (such as pop-sci books, podcasts, blogs), this point is mostly ignored, and getting reliable information about this facet of health and well-being interventions would be great.
People very often speak of effect sizes as if they were a thing inherent to an intervention or substance, when actually they quite often seem to depend strongly on the person. An intervention with a strong positive effect size on only 10% of people could be much more exciting than an intervention with a weak effect on everybody. Even a large positive effect on small number of people combined with negative effects on the rest could be a very useful intervention, given you find out early enough whether it works for you or not. Getting some insight into the nature of variance of different interventions, if such data is available, could be really useful. It might of course be the case that most studies don’t offer such insights, because it’s impossible to tell whether the subset of participants that benefited from an intervention can be attributed to noise or not.
That’s a great point! I definitely intend to review what evidence is available for the size of individual differences in benefit from a given intervention. As you point out, if there are ways of accounting for this in how to select/ prioritise interventions, that could be particularly useful.
Interesting project! It reminds me a bit of Huberman lab, the existence and apparent popularity of which could be taken as an argument in favor of ESH to be worthwhile (although format, target audience and focus might of course differ quite a bit).
One thing I personally find very interesting is the point you mentioned as a counter argument: “Individual differences in benefit significantly outweigh the general differences in value between interventions”—in my opinion, this could even be viewed as quite the opposite: my impression is that in most easily digestible sources (such as pop-sci books, podcasts, blogs), this point is mostly ignored, and getting reliable information about this facet of health and well-being interventions would be great.
People very often speak of effect sizes as if they were a thing inherent to an intervention or substance, when actually they quite often seem to depend strongly on the person. An intervention with a strong positive effect size on only 10% of people could be much more exciting than an intervention with a weak effect on everybody. Even a large positive effect on small number of people combined with negative effects on the rest could be a very useful intervention, given you find out early enough whether it works for you or not. Getting some insight into the nature of variance of different interventions, if such data is available, could be really useful. It might of course be the case that most studies don’t offer such insights, because it’s impossible to tell whether the subset of participants that benefited from an intervention can be attributed to noise or not.
That’s a great point! I definitely intend to review what evidence is available for the size of individual differences in benefit from a given intervention. As you point out, if there are ways of accounting for this in how to select/ prioritise interventions, that could be particularly useful.