I'm not a purely hedonic utilitarian but I think understanding and eliminating the sources of the greatest pain and suffering is important. Humans aren't good at reasoning about pain severity. There's a trick the brain plays (especially when depressed) that the pain being experienced is "the worst possible". However, it can't be that everyone's pain is the worst (although it may in truth be the worst the person has experienced themselves). Several times I've experienced pain (either psychological or physical, or some combination) which felt like the worst possible (at least along some dimension) only to find later that far greater pain is possible.
You know that Black Mirror episode where the doctor uses a BCI device to feel his patient's pain (S4E6: "Black Museum")? I think that could be useful here for comparing instantaneous pain states across wildly different situations.
It's pretty obvious that what matters is the integral, and philosophers arguing otherwise just seem to be spinning yarn. The integral over instantaneous values is what matters. Unfortunately this is hard to measure and retrospective analyses trying to gauge this integral really suck. Pain experienced is not any less a tragedy if forgotten shortly afterwards. We all die in the end, the ultimate forgetting.
I don't understand why this is being downvoted. I'm reading the SSC post now and haven't read all, but I agree this should be explored more. Consider hypnosis - there are anecdotal reports it can be used to get rid of pain. I sorta doubt how far hypnosis can go to eliminate pain but it appears understudied and if it's true it can really eliminate major pain and if hypnosis (either self or administered) could be systematized and delivered at scale, it would could revolutionize how we treat pain.
At the very least, we already know psychological treatments already work for some conditions involving chronic pain like CFS/ME and Fibromyalgia, but they are underutilized. Patient groups resist these treatments, because of the stigma around mental illness and confusions about the mind-body connection. CBT combined with graded exercise therapy is the only intervention for CFS/ME with multiple RCTs backing it up. It stands to reason that CBT (or similar interventions like DBT / third wave CBT) may be helpful for other chronic conditions which are medically unexplained and for which no good treatments exist.
late to reply, but those are fair points, thanks for pointing that out. I do need to be more careful about attribution and stereotyping. The phenomena I see which I was trying to point at is that in the push to find "the most intelligent people" they end up selecting for autistic people, who in term select more autistic people. There's also a self-selection thing going on -- neurotypicals don't find working with a team of autistic people very attractive, while autistic people do. Hence the lack of diversity.
Yeah there are more men in EA but notice this: you can have a gender ratio of 54% men, 46% women and have 9x as many single men if 45% of men and 45% of women are partnered already. Looking at single people only amplifies gender ratio.
Aside: this is also why there are so many guys in the Bay Area complaining they can't find a girlfriend vs places like Boston even though the overall gender ratio isn't that much different.
There are and have been a lot startups working on similar things (AI to assist researchers), going back to IBM's ill-fated Watson. Your demo makes it look very useful and is definitely the most impressive I've seen. I'm deeply suspicious of demos, however.
How can you test if your system is actually useful for researchers?
[One (albeit imperfect) way to gauge utility is to see if people are willing to pay money for it and keep paying money for it over time. However, I assume that is not the plan here. I guess another thing would be to track how much people use it over time or see if they fall away from using it. Another of course would be an RCT, although it's not clear how it would be structured.]
There's also a retreat being run for ACX and rationality meetup organizers (https://www.rationalitymeetups.org/new-page-4) July 21 - 24, and a lot of pre-events and after parties planned for EAG SF. (I can send people GDocs with lists if anyone is interested.. I'm not sure if the organizers want them shared publicly).
There should be other options for 2FA you can setup going forward, like authenticator or using the Gmail app on your phone. Some cell providers allow calls / SMS over wifi now, too. There's also might be a way to use backup codes.
Yes, it seems so! This has definitely been mentioned by Chris Buck in relation to combating bird flu.
FWIW we are now working on something like this at http://metascienceobservatory.org/ !!
Best practice is to always define acronyms before using them!
I'm not a purely hedonic utilitarian but I think understanding and eliminating the sources of the greatest pain and suffering is important. Humans aren't good at reasoning about pain severity. There's a trick the brain plays (especially when depressed) that the pain being experienced is "the worst possible". However, it can't be that everyone's pain is the worst (although it may in truth be the worst the person has experienced themselves). Several times I've experienced pain (either psychological or physical, or some combination) which felt like the worst possible (at least along some dimension) only to find later that far greater pain is possible.
You know that Black Mirror episode where the doctor uses a BCI device to feel his patient's pain (S4E6: "Black Museum")? I think that could be useful here for comparing instantaneous pain states across wildly different situations.
It's pretty obvious that what matters is the integral, and philosophers arguing otherwise just seem to be spinning yarn. The integral over instantaneous values is what matters. Unfortunately this is hard to measure and retrospective analyses trying to gauge this integral really suck. Pain experienced is not any less a tragedy if forgotten shortly afterwards. We all die in the end, the ultimate forgetting.
I don't understand why this is being downvoted. I'm reading the SSC post now and haven't read all, but I agree this should be explored more. Consider hypnosis - there are anecdotal reports it can be used to get rid of pain. I sorta doubt how far hypnosis can go to eliminate pain but it appears understudied and if it's true it can really eliminate major pain and if hypnosis (either self or administered) could be systematized and delivered at scale, it would could revolutionize how we treat pain.
At the very least, we already know psychological treatments already work for some conditions involving chronic pain like CFS/ME and Fibromyalgia, but they are underutilized. Patient groups resist these treatments, because of the stigma around mental illness and confusions about the mind-body connection. CBT combined with graded exercise therapy is the only intervention for CFS/ME with multiple RCTs backing it up. It stands to reason that CBT (or similar interventions like DBT / third wave CBT) may be helpful for other chronic conditions which are medically unexplained and for which no good treatments exist.
late to reply, but those are fair points, thanks for pointing that out. I do need to be more careful about attribution and stereotyping. The phenomena I see which I was trying to point at is that in the push to find "the most intelligent people" they end up selecting for autistic people, who in term select more autistic people. There's also a self-selection thing going on -- neurotypicals don't find working with a team of autistic people very attractive, while autistic people do. Hence the lack of diversity.
Yeah there are more men in EA but notice this: you can have a gender ratio of 54% men, 46% women and have 9x as many single men if 45% of men and 45% of women are partnered already. Looking at single people only amplifies gender ratio.
Aside: this is also why there are so many guys in the Bay Area complaining they can't find a girlfriend vs places like Boston even though the overall gender ratio isn't that much different.
There are and have been a lot startups working on similar things (AI to assist researchers), going back to IBM's ill-fated Watson. Your demo makes it look very useful and is definitely the most impressive I've seen. I'm deeply suspicious of demos, however.
How can you test if your system is actually useful for researchers?
[One (albeit imperfect) way to gauge utility is to see if people are willing to pay money for it and keep paying money for it over time. However, I assume that is not the plan here. I guess another thing would be to track how much people use it over time or see if they fall away from using it. Another of course would be an RCT, although it's not clear how it would be structured.]
There's also a retreat being run for ACX and rationality meetup organizers (https://www.rationalitymeetups.org/new-page-4) July 21 - 24, and a lot of pre-events and after parties planned for EAG SF. (I can send people GDocs with lists if anyone is interested.. I'm not sure if the organizers want them shared publicly).
There should be other options for 2FA you can setup going forward, like authenticator or using the Gmail app on your phone. Some cell providers allow calls / SMS over wifi now, too. There's also might be a way to use backup codes.