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If a person's mental state can impact their decisions and the quality of their work, why aren't we tracking the subjective states of those conducting research?

If a person's mental state can impact their decisions and the quality of their work, why aren't we tracking the subjective states of those conducting research? And does http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu provide a tool for doing so?

devoply 9y ago
This sounds very scary and totalitarian. We have the law and the police that's the maximum level of intrusion I am willing to tolerate in terms of monitoring my personal state and behavior. Anything more than that and I am gone.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
  I agree. Thankfully, as human beings, we're capable of coming up with systems using this technology to solve the subjectivity problem in a responsible, ethical manner. It doesn't have to be one involving the law.
  - devoply 9y ago
    Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. I hope you are being sarcastic because we know that more or less any such technology not only has the possibility of being abused but has been shown to be abused in practice over and over again.
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      And yet the technology exists. Who would you rather use it: those who sell to develop a responsible framework for using it or those who seek to abuse it? This tech is only going to become more accurate and more widespread over time. Ignoring it isn't an option. We've got little to no idea how to responsibly use human emotion as an input and decades worth of collective experience on how to exploit it. The potential for abuse is high, which means extreme transparency is needed, at the very least. Operating at an emotional level requires a whole new set of metrics and a fundamental shift in how we do anything. Better to figure it out now than to wait until the tech becomes ubiquitous. Those looking to exploit the tech most definitely won't wait for that day. A few people I've spoken to about it were eager to explore the tech purely for the sake of improving sales of various things. I changed the subject with them after realizing they had little regard for human life in this context. People concerned about this need to band together to find ways to productively use it and defend against its misuse. I've been working on such a framework, if anyone's interested in exploring it with me.
Bakary 9y ago
This would end up being counterproductive as the small minority of papers removed this way for a good reason would not make up for a vast number of scholars being alienated and distracted from their work due to the intrusive investigations. Even without that loss of productivity it's still unclear whether allocating resources to this monitoring would be cost-effective.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
  The purpose isn't to remove papers. It's to help guide and reproduce experiments. What if we can only reproduce certain desirable results when researchers feel a certain way? This is too important to simply dismiss out of fear. Science needs more courage, not less.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    How do you ensure the validity of such questionnaire? Sociology and psychology have enough problems without tossing a recursive one on top. Moreover, make sure to verify the hypothesis that mental state is important to scientific reproducibility.
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      Science will necessarily become slightly more subjective than it is. Things have become way too objective, to the point of denying emotions play a vital part in all we do. The validity is up to the researcher to provide & will need to be done in as emotionally "safe" way/place as possible if we don't want to risk training scientists to deny their emotions to the point of separating their biological responses from their emotions. That'd be a disaster. This tech introduces all kinds of dangerous potential effects, so anyone working on or with it will need to take extra care.

devoply 9y ago

This sounds very scary and totalitarian. We have the law and the police that's the maximum level of intrusion I am willing to tolerate in terms of monitoring my personal state and behavior. Anything more than that and I am gone.

crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
I agree. Thankfully, as human beings, we're capable of coming up with systems using this technology to solve the subjectivity problem in a responsible, ethical manner. It doesn't have to be one involving the law.
- devoply 9y ago
  Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. I hope you are being sarcastic because we know that more or less any such technology not only has the possibility of being abused but has been shown to be abused in practice over and over again.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    And yet the technology exists. Who would you rather use it: those who sell to develop a responsible framework for using it or those who seek to abuse it? This tech is only going to become more accurate and more widespread over time. Ignoring it isn't an option. We've got little to no idea how to responsibly use human emotion as an input and decades worth of collective experience on how to exploit it. The potential for abuse is high, which means extreme transparency is needed, at the very least. Operating at an emotional level requires a whole new set of metrics and a fundamental shift in how we do anything. Better to figure it out now than to wait until the tech becomes ubiquitous. Those looking to exploit the tech most definitely won't wait for that day. A few people I've spoken to about it were eager to explore the tech purely for the sake of improving sales of various things. I changed the subject with them after realizing they had little regard for human life in this context. People concerned about this need to band together to find ways to productively use it and defend against its misuse. I've been working on such a framework, if anyone's interested in exploring it with me.

Bakary 9y ago

This would end up being counterproductive as the small minority of papers removed this way for a good reason would not make up for a vast number of scholars being alienated and distracted from their work due to the intrusive investigations. Even without that loss of productivity it's still unclear whether allocating resources to this monitoring would be cost-effective.

crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
The purpose isn't to remove papers. It's to help guide and reproduce experiments. What if we can only reproduce certain desirable results when researchers feel a certain way? This is too important to simply dismiss out of fear. Science needs more courage, not less.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  How do you ensure the validity of such questionnaire? Sociology and psychology have enough problems without tossing a recursive one on top. Moreover, make sure to verify the hypothesis that mental state is important to scientific reproducibility.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    Science will necessarily become slightly more subjective than it is. Things have become way too objective, to the point of denying emotions play a vital part in all we do. The validity is up to the researcher to provide & will need to be done in as emotionally "safe" way/place as possible if we don't want to risk training scientists to deny their emotions to the point of separating their biological responses from their emotions. That'd be a disaster. This tech introduces all kinds of dangerous potential effects, so anyone working on or with it will need to take extra care.