To do personal science well, what should you learn? Professional
scientists learn how to do science mostly in graduate school,
mostly by imitation, although they might take a statistics
class. Personal scientists rarely have anyone to imitate, so
have more need to understand basic principles. There are five
skills/dimensions that matter. Here are a few comments about
each one: 1. Motivation. In conventional science, the scientist
does it as part of a job and subjects are paid. Neither works
here: It isn’t a job and you can’t pay yourself. My original
motivation was wanting to learn how to do experiments (for my
job — experimental psychologist). After I discovered how useful
it could be, I started doing personal science to solve actual
problems, including early awakening and overweight. On these two
subjects (sleep and weight control) conventional scientists
seemed to have made and be making little progress, with a few
exceptions (such as Sclafani, Cabanac, and Ramirez) in the area
of weight control. Here my m