Dan Elton's guest appearances

Dan Elton

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The Nonlinear Library

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Michael Wiebe

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Neil Buddy Shah

Daniel Eth

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Elon Musk

OwlTail

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area, published by Dan Elton on May 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a cross-post from my Substack (original post here). Note: At the Effective Altruism Global: San Francisco conference in 2017, Prof. Will MacAskill implored the audience to “keep EA weird”. As the EA movement grows, it’s important to keep EA’s original spirit of exploration alive. To help do that, I’m planning to write several articles on potential new — and weird — cause areas. Effective altruists want to figure out how to do the most good per dollar spent. “Good” is often cached out in terms of deaths prevented or quality-adjusted life years saved (QALYs). QALYs attempt to adjust life-years for different states of health. However, the very method of QALY calculation, which typically involves surveys asking about trade-offs, might have some blind spots. For instance, if a disease state is rare, than most likely the requisite survey data for it has never been collected. The surveys themselves may have blind spots too. Consider these points from Andrés Gómez Emilsson (emphasis mine): “Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as ‘indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that's twisted into your insides non-stop for hours’. It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones .. you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life).”  Andres Gomez Emilsson As Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the remembering self is different than the experiencing self. People have trouble describing and conceptualizing extreme events, either positive or negative. People also don’t like thinking about extreme negative events generally, whether they experienced them or others did. I personally sometimes notice my brain flinching away when thinking about kidney stone pain, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. In the first part of this post I’ll go over the evidence for extreme pain events. Then, I’ll focus on kidney stones. The main reason for focusing on kidney stone pain is that over the past two years I’ve worked off-an-on on automated deep learning based software for detecting and measuring kidney stones in CT scans (see my paper in Medical Physics). So I have some expertise on the subject. Currently I am working with a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hopsital who is an expert on stone disease, Prof. Avinash Kambadakone. Background - suffering focused ethics “In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.” “Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.”— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) The idea that we should focus on eliminating suffering over increasing pleasure is intuitive to many people. See this recent Twitter poll from Robin Hanson: So, I don’t think I need to spend much time here convincing people that reducing suffering should take precedent over increasing happiness. Note what I have in mind here is what is called “weakly-negative utilitarianism” which is quite different than pure negative utilitarianism, which focuses only on eliminating suffering. Readers interested in diving further into these topics should check out Lukas Gloor’s essay “The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics”. Background - long-tailed distributions of pleasure and pain “...

<a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/feuSN98AtvhdqEu2w/kidney-stone-pain-as-a-potential-cause-area" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Link to original article</a> Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area, published by Dan Elton on May 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a cross-post from my Substack (original post here). Note: At the Effective Altruism Global: San Francisco conference in 2017, Prof. Will MacAskill implored the audience to “keep EA weird”. As the EA movement grows, it’s important to keep EA’s original spirit of exploration alive. To help do that, I’m planning to write several articles on potential new — and weird — cause areas. Effective altruists want to figure out how to do the most good per dollar spent. “Good” is often cached out in terms of deaths prevented or quality-adjusted life years saved (QALYs). QALYs attempt to adjust life-years for different states of health. However, the very method of QALY calculation, which typically involves surveys asking about trade-offs, might have some blind spots. For instance, if a disease state is rare, than most likely the requisite survey data for it has never been collected. The surveys themselves may have blind spots too. Consider these points from Andrés Gómez Emilsson (emphasis mine): “Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as ‘indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that's twisted into your insides non-stop for hours’. It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones .. you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life).” Andres Gomez Emilsson As Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the remembering self is different than the experiencing self. People have trouble describing and conceptualizing extreme events, either positive or negative. People also don’t like thinking about extreme negative events generally, whether they experienced them or others did. I personally sometimes notice my brain flinching away when thinking about kidney stone pain, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. In the first part of this post I’ll go over the evidence for extreme pain events. Then, I’ll focus on kidney stones. The main reason for focusing on kidney stone pain is that over the past two years I’ve worked off-an-on on automated deep learning based software for detecting and measuring kidney stones in CT scans (see my paper in Medical Physics). So I have some expertise on the subject. Currently I am working with a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hopsital who is an expert on stone disease, Prof. Avinash Kambadakone. Background - suffering focused ethics “In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.” “Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.”— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) The idea that we should focus on eliminating suffering over increasing pleasure is intuitive to many people. See this recent Twitter poll from Robin Hanson: So, I don’t think I need to spend much time here convincing people that reducing suffering should take precedent over increasing happiness. Note what I have in mind here is what is called “weakly-negative utilitarianism” which is quite different than pure negative utilitarianism, which focuses only on eliminating suffering. Readers interested in diving further into these topics should check out Lukas Gloor’s essay “The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics”. Background - long-tailed distributions of pleasure and pain “...

EA - Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area by Dan Elton

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area, published by Dan Elton on May 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a cross-post from my Substack (original post here). Note: At the Effective Altruism Global: San Francisco conference in 2017, Prof. Will MacAskill implored the audience to “keep EA weird”. As the EA movement grows, it’s important to keep EA’s original spirit of exploration alive. To help do that, I’m planning to write several articles on potential new — and weird — cause areas.Effective altruists want to figure out how to do the most good per dollar spent. “Good” is often cached out in terms of deaths prevented or quality-adjusted life years saved (QALYs). QALYs attempt to adjust life-years for different states of health. However, the very method of QALY calculation, which typically involves surveys asking about trade-offs, might have some blind spots. For instance, if a disease state is rare, than most likely the requisite survey data for it has never been collected. The surveys themselves may have blind spots too. Consider these points from Andrés Gómez Emilsson (emphasis mine):“Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as ‘indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that's twisted into your insides non-stop for hours’. It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones .. you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life).” Andres Gomez EmilssonAs Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the remembering self is different than the experiencing self. People have trouble describing and conceptualizing extreme events, either positive or negative. People also don’t like thinking about extreme negative events generally, whether they experienced them or others did. I personally sometimes notice my brain flinching away when thinking about kidney stone pain, even though I haven’t experienced it myself.In the first part of this post I’ll go over the evidence for extreme pain events. Then, I’ll focus on kidney stones. The main reason for focusing on kidney stone pain is that over the past two years I’ve worked off-an-on on automated deep learning based software for detecting and measuring kidney stones in CT scans (see my paper in Medical Physics). So I have some expertise on the subject. Currently I am working with a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hopsital who is an expert on stone disease, Prof. Avinash Kambadakone.Background - suffering focused ethics“In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.”“Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.”— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)The idea that we should focus on eliminating suffering over increasing pleasure is intuitive to many people. See this recent Twitter poll from Robin Hanson:So, I don’t think I need to spend much time here convincing people that reducing suffering should take precedent over increasing happiness. Note what I have in mind here is what is called “weakly-negative utilitarianism” which is quite different than pure negative utilitarianism, which focuses only on eliminating suffering. Readers interested in diving further into these topics should check out Lukas Gloor’s essay “The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics”.Background - long-tailed distributions of pleasure and pain“...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area, published by Dan Elton on May 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a cross-post from my Substack (original post here). Note: At the Effective Altruism Global: San Francisco conference in 2017, Prof. Will MacAskill implored the audience to “keep EA weird”. As the EA movement grows, it’s important to keep EA’s original spirit of exploration alive. To help do that, I’m planning to write several articles on potential new — and weird — cause areas. Effective altruists want to figure out how to do the most good per dollar spent. “Good” is often cached out in terms of deaths prevented or quality-adjusted life years saved (QALYs). QALYs attempt to adjust life-years for different states of health. However, the very method of QALY calculation, which typically involves surveys asking about trade-offs, might have some blind spots. For instance, if a disease state is rare, than most likely the requisite survey data for it has never been collected. The surveys themselves may have blind spots too. Consider these points from Andrés Gómez Emilsson (emphasis mine): “Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as ‘indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that's twisted into your insides non-stop for hours’. It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones .. you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life).” Andres Gomez Emilsson As Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the remembering self is different than the experiencing self. People have trouble describing and conceptualizing extreme events, either positive or negative. People also don’t like thinking about extreme negative events generally, whether they experienced them or others did. I personally sometimes notice my brain flinching away when thinking about kidney stone pain, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. In the first part of this post I’ll go over the evidence for extreme pain events. Then, I’ll focus on kidney stones. The main reason for focusing on kidney stone pain is that over the past two years I’ve worked off-an-on on automated deep learning based software for detecting and measuring kidney stones in CT scans (see my paper in Medical Physics). So I have some expertise on the subject. Currently I am working with a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hopsital who is an expert on stone disease, Prof. Avinash Kambadakone. Background - suffering focused ethics “In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.” “Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.”— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) The idea that we should focus on eliminating suffering over increasing pleasure is intuitive to many people. See this recent Twitter poll from Robin Hanson: So, I don’t think I need to spend much time here convincing people that reducing suffering should take precedent over increasing happiness. Note what I have in mind here is what is called “weakly-negative utilitarianism” which is quite different than pure negative utilitarianism, which focuses only on eliminating suffering. Readers interested in diving further into these topics should check out Lukas Gloor’s essay “The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics”. Background - long-tailed distributions of pleasure and pain “...

#AISafety We will be going DEEP with the smarty at the party --- Dr. Dan EltonCan computers be conscious?The ethics of AIDeep Learning TechniquesWhat is consciousness?Daniel Elton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he works on applications of machine learning to discovering new molecules and materials.He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University, where he studied the behavior of water molecules and how they absorb radiation by using computer simulations based on classical and quantum physics. His current interests span over AI, machine learning, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind.He blogs at www.moreisdifferent.com and tweets at @moreisdifferent.#AI #Consciousness #Podcast #Dallas #Physicist #ComputerGeek #SmartyAtTheParty

#AISafety We will be going DEEP with the smarty at the party --- Dr. Dan Elton Can computers be conscious? The ethics of AI Deep Learning Techniques What is consciousness? Daniel Elton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he works on applications of machine learning to discovering new molecules and materials. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University, where he studied the behavior of water molecules and how they absorb radiation by using computer simulations based on classical and quantum physics. His current interests span over AI, machine learning, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind. He blogs at <a href="http://www.moreisdifferent.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.moreisdifferent.com</a> and tweets at @moreisdifferent. #AI #Consciousness #Podcast #Dallas #Physicist #ComputerGeek #SmartyAtTheParty