7 ms·

I'd say very little good can come from this. What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Basically where it could excel is giving pro

I'd say very little good can come from this. What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Basically where it could excel is giving probabilistic prediction of "mental disorders" across a high volume of users. What is a good thing you would do with that? Advertising to suggest someone to get help, maybe?

DocTomoe 5y ago
I can see companies using this to screen applications to filter out potentially problematic people, sometimes with more social acceptability (think airline pilots), sometimes with less (most other jobs). If you consider that "good" is another matter.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  Precisely. The cyber stalking of applicants is about to get even worse. Anyone having a public presence on social media is hurting themselves.
  - dasyatidprime 5y ago
    And anyone without one is then nobody.
    - bogwog 5y ago
      Someone needs to build a bot that posts boring, but socially acceptable content that won’t raise any red flags for potential employers.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        I disagree. I happily include my personal site with quite some controversial articles (being my opinion at that time) on it in my resume. It works as a great filter for companies I wouldn't want to work for.
        pc86 5y ago
        This works great for competent, experienced software engineers who are in extremely high demand right now. To be blunt, most people are not that valuable economically to a company, and so have to fight a lot more to get a lot less. Most people would find a hard time getting work with any broadly controversial topics associated with them. There's also the argument that software engineers may not always be in such high demand, and you never know what's going to be catalogued and indexed to you 10, 20, 30 years from now.
        sdoering 5y ago
        I am in demand now as a data analyst. But I did that already in my first jobs after college. I was able to get by on working as a bartender while looking for a job. I had fun doing it and little cost of living. Why should I have sacrificed my mental health or my happiness for a job working for assholes? (pardon my language)
        pc86 5y ago
        I'm not saying you should have done it. I'm saying a lot of people have to.
        bogwog 5y ago
        When you find yourself having to make a public apology for an old blog post in the future, you’re going to regret doing that. Or maybe a gen Z hacker that hasn’t been born yet will ransomware your business because you wrote an article today with a word that will become socially unacceptable in the future. I have no delusions that my political opinions or writing style are original enough or convincing enough to change the world. So it’s all just risk for me. If I’m writing something on my blog, it’s probably a focused technical article with no politics and little to no humor.
      - pc86 5y ago
        Honestly you could probably train a GPT-3 based model on the posts of medium and high profile people in whatever industry you work in, add a couple post-content generation checks to eliminate any accidental plagiarism, and you'd be most of the way there.
    - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
      Then I'm nobody and I'm good with that.
eurasiantiger 5y ago
> excel We must apply this to spreadsheets ASAP.
randomsilence 5y ago
An "appropriate" use is of course targeted advertising. You can create products with a brand image that appeals to specific personalities. Then you buy advertising space when the person is in an emotional state where they are most receptive to your ad. An appropriate use could be the treatment of those mental disorders on an 'industrial scale'. You can use the technology to identify as well as apply cost-effective tools that allow people with mental issues to heal and grow.
bobthechef 5y ago
flownoon 5y ago
Youre right that getting rates of mental disorders at the population level is a useful application. Checkout for example the hedonometer: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2021-12-05&to=2022-03-04 https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2021-12-05&t.... People have also done population-level research showing that bad weather affect various seniment-based metrics of mental health: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195750 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- apwheele 5y ago
  This doesn't work as a reasonable objective measure of population mental health disorders for several reasons. 1) The oversampling of the training set makes it uncalibrated when applied to the general population (to recalibrate you need an estimate of the prevalence to begin with, which sort of defeats the purpose). 2) Online posts are not a random sample of the population. (Perhaps this is solveable with some poststratification of the estimates, although requires demographic data on the poster.) If you take self reports that the researchers used to define disorders at face value, those would make more sense than using this model. These text based models are so superficial, when applied to mass datasets with low prevalence of the underlying condition, they will ultimately result in very low positive predictive values (e.g. flag 100 people, if the model is good will only get 5/100 as actual mental health problems). As version_five asks, it is hard to imagine any reasonable use of the model given such low positive predictive values (which imply incredibly high false positive rates).
- mistrial9 5y ago
  > getting rates of mental disorders at the population level is a useful application this post sounds dangerous to me -- there are vast differences in a legal judgement and a medical judgement; thirdly, political policy levers are sometimes used in ways that make very little sense, due to situational factors. It is no secret that humans are competitive, tend towards violence, and political oppression exists to some extent, of some groups, almost everywhere. A "medical judgement" used for legal or worse, political purposes, I claim, is dangerous. The post above this one appears to make no distinctions and leans towards "yes, do this."
gillesjacobs 5y ago
I worked on a shared task (CLPsych [1]) that estimates mental distress severity. So the classification task was to determine how acutely a user message/post on a mental health forum would require moderator intervention. Some people announce their suicides live on the forum for instance. You want to point the moderators to those people asap. Our research group applied this tech to Belgium's suicide prevention center chat tool, so the workers can prioritize based on severity. 1. https://aclanthology.org/W16-0312/ https://aclanthology.org/W16-0312/
- excitednumber 5y ago
  Did you open source your solution?
amelius 5y ago
> What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Applying it to the statements of dictators so you know when to replace them?
- bonzini 5y ago
  Euphemisms anyone?
frabbit 5y ago
> What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Well, investigative officers concerned for the well-being of the individual and the potential for self harm or danger to others could attempt to help them with a taser or a shotgun. Or, if you are a liberal you could have an algorithmic silo-ing of their posts? That way it would be demonstrably not a prejudiced censorship but something that could be investigated later if the right channels are followed. It could be coupled with the software that detects whether people are homosexual or conservative based on their physiognomy.
- frabbit 5y ago
  Also, it could usefully be used to identify people for treatment as was done in the old USSR: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/
criddell 5y ago
Could there be some public health benefits? Could the data help governments decide where to spend money and evaluate if the money spent has had any effect?
- shane_b 5y ago
  if the concern is abuse, i wouldn’t give it to gov
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Right, because it's better to trust that analysis to FaceBook. Why they could even pop-up something suggesting you seek help.
    - shane_b 5y ago
      i assume this is sarcasm which is unhelpful. the original claim was to trust no one. my comment was the government should also not be trusted. people put on such a front on social i wouldn’t trust any analysis. especially not health related
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        If that was your original intent, you phrased it really badly. You didn't say "trust no one". People were asking what to do with it, and you said "i wouldn’t give it to gov". That isn't "this is dangerous and shouldn't exist".
        shane_b 5y ago
        > I'd say very little good can come from this. > if the concern is abuse not my intent, OP. the comment i replied to suggested gov instead. i made a comment about gov there was as much reason to assume what i meant as much as what you assumed
        5y ago
amalcon 5y ago
The most likely good is in the ability to study the model itself to better understand mental disorders and therefore inform treatment, or in the ability to deploy something similar to monitor folks who are already clinical patients on an opt-in basis. I'd agree with you that the deployment of the model in almost any context re: observation of the general public is very unlikely to be beneficial.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
geoduck14 5y ago
You could actually use it to counter bias in an existing system. Consider a real example from a prior coworker: We lend money for mortgages to people based on legitimate criteria: FICO score, income, etc. THEN, we use a model to see if we lend more/less money to African Ameicans at better/worse rates. If we see bias in this model, we make adjustments to the first model so that they are "treated fairly". I've seen the same done on message boards where certain actions were more likely for men vs women - and the administration discovered they were accidentally awarding more points to men vs women. So they adjusted the points for different actions so women had an fair-ish chance at getting points
ummwhat 5y ago
Boundless good will come of it from the perspective of the people running the system. Just abandon the idea that the system exists to help you or make society better. this sounds like a fantastic tool to use psychiatric diagnosis the way it's supposed to be used: as a science-shaped cudgel with which to beat inconvenient members of society. Remember that time in living memory when homosexuality was in the DSM. Now picture that but with machine learning able to pick out the gay posters online.
_Nat_ 5y ago
Dunno if it's too productive to fret over the appropriateness of computational-tools. I mean, when it comes to stuff like mass-surveillance, we can debate the merits of having such a mass-surveillance infrastructure. But when it comes to simple calculatory tools, they're basically just thoughts -- thoughts that people can have even without AI, and presumably'll become increasingly well-developed over time. Forward-facing ethical-frameworks should probably discount perceived scarcity of computation. This is, if we're talking ethics, presumably we ought to consider things under a presumption of ample cheap computing power, as that seems to be the direction we're going in. In other words, it ought to become trivial for individuals to come up with better methodologies than this on a whim. And since it'll be so easy for most folks to think up (and implement) stuff like this on their own, there's little point in fretting over exploration of such things now. Rather, we presumably ought to regard stuff like this as mundane thinking.
renewiltord 5y ago
I could use it to see if I sound like a crazy person.
pcdoodle 5y ago
I want a browser plugin for reddit to confirm my suspicions.

DocTomoe 5y ago

I can see companies using this to screen applications to filter out potentially problematic people, sometimes with more social acceptability (think airline pilots), sometimes with less (most other jobs). If you consider that "good" is another matter.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwuxiytayq 5y ago
Precisely. The cyber stalking of applicants is about to get even worse. Anyone having a public presence on social media is hurting themselves.
- dasyatidprime 5y ago
  And anyone without one is then nobody.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    Someone needs to build a bot that posts boring, but socially acceptable content that won’t raise any red flags for potential employers.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      I disagree. I happily include my personal site with quite some controversial articles (being my opinion at that time) on it in my resume. It works as a great filter for companies I wouldn't want to work for.
      - pc86 5y ago
        This works great for competent, experienced software engineers who are in extremely high demand right now. To be blunt, most people are not that valuable economically to a company, and so have to fight a lot more to get a lot less. Most people would find a hard time getting work with any broadly controversial topics associated with them. There's also the argument that software engineers may not always be in such high demand, and you never know what's going to be catalogued and indexed to you 10, 20, 30 years from now.
        sdoering 5y ago
        I am in demand now as a data analyst. But I did that already in my first jobs after college. I was able to get by on working as a bartender while looking for a job. I had fun doing it and little cost of living. Why should I have sacrificed my mental health or my happiness for a job working for assholes? (pardon my language)
        pc86 5y ago
        I'm not saying you should have done it. I'm saying a lot of people have to.
      - bogwog 5y ago
        When you find yourself having to make a public apology for an old blog post in the future, you’re going to regret doing that. Or maybe a gen Z hacker that hasn’t been born yet will ransomware your business because you wrote an article today with a word that will become socially unacceptable in the future. I have no delusions that my political opinions or writing style are original enough or convincing enough to change the world. So it’s all just risk for me. If I’m writing something on my blog, it’s probably a focused technical article with no politics and little to no humor.
    - pc86 5y ago
      Honestly you could probably train a GPT-3 based model on the posts of medium and high profile people in whatever industry you work in, add a couple post-content generation checks to eliminate any accidental plagiarism, and you'd be most of the way there.
  - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    Then I'm nobody and I'm good with that.

eurasiantiger 5y ago

> excel We must apply this to spreadsheets ASAP.

randomsilence 5y ago

An "appropriate" use is of course targeted advertising. You can create products with a brand image that appeals to specific personalities. Then you buy advertising space when the person is in an emotional state where they are most receptive to your ad. An appropriate use could be the treatment of those mental disorders on an 'industrial scale'. You can use the technology to identify as well as apply cost-effective tools that allow people with mental issues to heal and grow.

bobthechef 5y ago

flownoon 5y ago

Youre right that getting rates of mental disorders at the population level is a useful application. Checkout for example the hedonometer: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2021-12-05&to=2022-03-04 https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2021-12-05&t.... People have also done population-level research showing that bad weather affect various seniment-based metrics of mental health: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195750 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

apwheele 5y ago
This doesn't work as a reasonable objective measure of population mental health disorders for several reasons. 1) The oversampling of the training set makes it uncalibrated when applied to the general population (to recalibrate you need an estimate of the prevalence to begin with, which sort of defeats the purpose). 2) Online posts are not a random sample of the population. (Perhaps this is solveable with some poststratification of the estimates, although requires demographic data on the poster.) If you take self reports that the researchers used to define disorders at face value, those would make more sense than using this model. These text based models are so superficial, when applied to mass datasets with low prevalence of the underlying condition, they will ultimately result in very low positive predictive values (e.g. flag 100 people, if the model is good will only get 5/100 as actual mental health problems). As version_five asks, it is hard to imagine any reasonable use of the model given such low positive predictive values (which imply incredibly high false positive rates).
mistrial9 5y ago
> getting rates of mental disorders at the population level is a useful application this post sounds dangerous to me -- there are vast differences in a legal judgement and a medical judgement; thirdly, political policy levers are sometimes used in ways that make very little sense, due to situational factors. It is no secret that humans are competitive, tend towards violence, and political oppression exists to some extent, of some groups, almost everywhere. A "medical judgement" used for legal or worse, political purposes, I claim, is dangerous. The post above this one appears to make no distinctions and leans towards "yes, do this."

gillesjacobs 5y ago

I worked on a shared task (CLPsych [1]) that estimates mental distress severity. So the classification task was to determine how acutely a user message/post on a mental health forum would require moderator intervention. Some people announce their suicides live on the forum for instance. You want to point the moderators to those people asap. Our research group applied this tech to Belgium's suicide prevention center chat tool, so the workers can prioritize based on severity. 1. https://aclanthology.org/W16-0312/ https://aclanthology.org/W16-0312/

excitednumber 5y ago
Did you open source your solution?

amelius 5y ago

> What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Applying it to the statements of dictators so you know when to replace them?

bonzini 5y ago
Euphemisms anyone?

frabbit 5y ago

> What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology? Well, investigative officers concerned for the well-being of the individual and the potential for self harm or danger to others could attempt to help them with a taser or a shotgun. Or, if you are a liberal you could have an algorithmic silo-ing of their posts? That way it would be demonstrably not a prejudiced censorship but something that could be investigated later if the right channels are followed. It could be coupled with the software that detects whether people are homosexual or conservative based on their physiognomy.

frabbit 5y ago
Also, it could usefully be used to identify people for treatment as was done in the old USSR: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/

criddell 5y ago

Could there be some public health benefits? Could the data help governments decide where to spend money and evaluate if the money spent has had any effect?

shane_b 5y ago
if the concern is abuse, i wouldn’t give it to gov
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Right, because it's better to trust that analysis to FaceBook. Why they could even pop-up something suggesting you seek help.
  - shane_b 5y ago
    i assume this is sarcasm which is unhelpful. the original claim was to trust no one. my comment was the government should also not be trusted. people put on such a front on social i wouldn’t trust any analysis. especially not health related
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      If that was your original intent, you phrased it really badly. You didn't say "trust no one". People were asking what to do with it, and you said "i wouldn’t give it to gov". That isn't "this is dangerous and shouldn't exist".
      - shane_b 5y ago
        > I'd say very little good can come from this. > if the concern is abuse not my intent, OP. the comment i replied to suggested gov instead. i made a comment about gov there was as much reason to assume what i meant as much as what you assumed
        5y ago

amalcon 5y ago

The most likely good is in the ability to study the model itself to better understand mental disorders and therefore inform treatment, or in the ability to deploy something similar to monitor folks who are already clinical patients on an opt-in basis. I'd agree with you that the deployment of the model in almost any context re: observation of the general public is very unlikely to be beneficial.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

geoduck14 5y ago

You could actually use it to counter bias in an existing system. Consider a real example from a prior coworker: We lend money for mortgages to people based on legitimate criteria: FICO score, income, etc. THEN, we use a model to see if we lend more/less money to African Ameicans at better/worse rates. If we see bias in this model, we make adjustments to the first model so that they are "treated fairly". I've seen the same done on message boards where certain actions were more likely for men vs women - and the administration discovered they were accidentally awarding more points to men vs women. So they adjusted the points for different actions so women had an fair-ish chance at getting points

ummwhat 5y ago

Boundless good will come of it from the perspective of the people running the system. Just abandon the idea that the system exists to help you or make society better. this sounds like a fantastic tool to use psychiatric diagnosis the way it's supposed to be used: as a science-shaped cudgel with which to beat inconvenient members of society. Remember that time in living memory when homosexuality was in the DSM. Now picture that but with machine learning able to pick out the gay posters online.

_Nat_ 5y ago

Dunno if it's too productive to fret over the appropriateness of computational-tools. I mean, when it comes to stuff like mass-surveillance, we can debate the merits of having such a mass-surveillance infrastructure. But when it comes to simple calculatory tools, they're basically just thoughts -- thoughts that people can have even without AI, and presumably'll become increasingly well-developed over time. Forward-facing ethical-frameworks should probably discount perceived scarcity of computation. This is, if we're talking ethics, presumably we ought to consider things under a presumption of ample cheap computing power, as that seems to be the direction we're going in. In other words, it ought to become trivial for individuals to come up with better methodologies than this on a whim. And since it'll be so easy for most folks to think up (and implement) stuff like this on their own, there's little point in fretting over exploration of such things now. Rather, we presumably ought to regard stuff like this as mundane thinking.

renewiltord 5y ago

I could use it to see if I sound like a crazy person.

pcdoodle 5y ago

I want a browser plugin for reddit to confirm my suspicions.