I decided to try this experiment after reading this blog post by @ElizabethVanNostrand, which suggests that people with vague digestive and mood issues may benefit from supplementing inositol.

I will be undertaking a blinded trial with inositol using the following protocol:

1. Take 500mg inositol or a placebo (blinded) before starting work, only on regular work days.

2. At the end of my work day, give a subjective measurement of my energy levels throughout the day between 0-10.

3. Repeat for 20 work days.

(Protocol taken from here, which has sources: https://n1.tools/experiments/energy/inositol)

Resolution criteria: Resolves YES if a naive model (i.e. that doesn't include confounders etc.) suggests at least an 80% probability that consuming inositol increases my energy levels.

In other words: "Compared to placebo, a difference in energy between 0 and xx is at least 80% likely".

For reference, my previous market on whether L-Tyrosine improves focus used 20 data points and resulted in mean focus (placebo) of 7.4 and mean focus (L-Tyrosine) of 7.0. The model suggested that "Compared to placebo, a difference in focus between 0% and 30% is 19.4% likely". Image from that experiment below.

Extra notes:
- Starting this experiment today.

- I've been to a doctor twice for weird pains in my gut, both times they said I'm fine. I feel like I'm also quite lethargic day-to-day, but I'm not sure how that compares to the general population.
- I won't bet on this market.
- Doing this on work days only so the environment etc is consistent.

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Model details (for those interested)

I'll model the posterior distribution of energy values with the placebo and with inositol, and then merge those to create a posterior distribution for the absolute difference in energy between the two. I'll be using a Bayesian model for this, which requires a prior to update. That prior will be the mean anxiety for the placebo and inositol from the data itself (which is informative, and means the data will basically define the posterior distribution).

Priors:

Mean Inositol ~ Normal(mean_data, std_data)

Mean Placebo ~ Normal(mean_data, std_data)

StdDev Inositol ~ HalfNormal(5)

StdDev Placebo ~ HalfNormal(5)

Likelihoods:

Data Inositol ~ Normal(Mean Inositol, StdDev Inositol)

Data Placebo ~ Normal(Mean Placebo, StdDev Placebo)

Deterministic Transformation for Absolute Difference:

Absolute Difference = Mean Inositol - Mean Placebo

Posterior Inference:

Probability(Absolute Difference ≥ 0) ≥ 0.80