7 ms·
Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives
- Animats 3y agoSo that's how Precrime works.
- leeeeeepw 3y ago[dead]
- neural_thing 3y agoI wonder if fine tuning GPT-4 on the records would do significantly better
- anigbrowl 3y agoI have mixed feelings about this. It could be a great tool to help people, but on past experience it seems more likely that HR departments/ financial service providers/ governments would use it to write people off if they have too many negative life indicators.
- reactordev 3y agoThis. It would be the envy of every insurance company. How risky are you really? I’m glad I’m not the only one that immediately thought about this.
- matrix87 3y agoInsurance companies are probably already doing something like this anyway
- m463 3y agoI remember talking to an actuary once. Actuaries have to be scientifically accurate with respect to risk. If they underestimate the risk, the premiums don't cover the losses. If they overestimate them, they lose in the market. So I asked her if a red sports car should REALLY be that much more expensive to insure than a grey family car. She told me, yes, the pricing actually correlates very well with the risk. The only time when pricing is NOT correlated with the risk is AFTER an accident. Statistically after an accident, drivers become safer, but the insurance companies will not lower the rates charged to reflect it.
- junofan 3y agoThey’re doing it anyway. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
- MattDaEskimo 3y agoI'd like to believe that lives are way too nuanced to properly train and evaluate a transformer this way. Also, I would wager that upon release, suddenly everybody says they eat healthy and exercise daily.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI have an acquaintance who is convinced that Google ads stalk him because the ads make inferences yet shouldn't be able to, like offering flight prices from one city to another he frequents when he's never done that search in Google before. I've tried to explain to him that people aren't actually very unique in large models, and there's probably several signals Google does have from his other searches to conclude he's interested in those two cities.
- jedberg 3y agoDoes he use Gmail? Because it gets all of his flight confirmations and Calendar events. Does he use Google Maps, because it gets his realtime location whenever he uses it. If he frequently goes to those cities, they would certainly know if he uses any other Google service.
- wharvle 3y agoEvery time we get better at things like this, all the power tends to stay with organizations, and individual people are lucky if they get anything out of it. Amazon, Wal-Mart, MacDonalds, giant banks, insurers, et c., analyze their competition, suppliers, and consumers in great detail with computer data and models. Where’s the widespread automated buyer’s agent for consumers, to balance that power so strongly that it shoves profit margins the other direction, so it’s not just megacorps pushing ever closer to some absolute limit of the last tenth of a cent they can wring out of us? Fucking nowhere, they’d never allow that kind of access to the data we’d need, the best we get is “CamelCamelCamel”, not some Siri-alike we can casually tell to go find the best price/quality intersection on the market for [product] and have that show up a couple days later. And we’ll never get it. Just an ever-tightening noose of perfect price discrimination and risk calculation that goes only one way. Short of legislating radical levels of availability (and reliability and consistency—standards and minimums) for price and product information, anyway, and I’m pretty sure that’s on nobody’s radar.
- zmgsabst 3y agoScraping is legal; as are assistive technologies. What’s lacking is the collective willpower to develop social organizations, which could orchestrate and fund such efforts. There’s a complete lack of organization among the public. The problem is neither technical nor legislative: people just don’t care to, and are happier accepting the status quo.
- garrisonhh 3y agoPeople don't have the time, money, or energy. And they will continue to lose all three until there is no option but to figure out collective organisation
- nehal3m 3y agoIt definitely feels deliberate and yeah it is a feedback loop.
- 3y ago
- derbOac 3y agoThis is a critical problem of our time in my opinion. Persons are approached as static unchangeable objects, as if their trajectories are deterministic and what you're doing with these models are resolving the trajectories like a telescope or microscope. Measuring the substance of the person so you can extract from them. The other schema is one where you're modeling manipulation effectiveness, to probe and predict how you can best (most effectively with the least resources) achieve some change in the trajectory. Engineering a person. It seems like we really only think of interventions as trying to return someone to some baseline condition, rather than to try to improve people beyond the baseline, to invest in them. The paper has a bit at the end about using it for personalized interventions but it feels performative, like lip service. I know one of the authors professionally in a distant sense so I think they're probably genuine about it, but I can't help but wonder how the paper might be different if intervention was actually their focus. Wouldn't they be modeling changes in trajectories, the deviations or something?
- reality_inspctr 3y agoI tried to build a startup based on a similar idea, but the traction was not good. The squarespace website is still up https://sundialcalendar.com/ https://sundialcalendar.com/ It’s stunning how much of our lives are predictable. We are free will surfers on waves of determinism.
- walterbell 3y ago> We are free will surfers on waves of determinism As the cost of real-time surveillance, prediction and "nudging" continue to fall, the cumulative feedback loop can converge into human archetypes which are as much a function of the observer as the observed. In an ocean of sensors and stimuli, how can past free will influence our future selves? Any stories you can share from users of your service?
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoThe website is still up, but I take it the startup is fully shuttered? If not, I'd love to try it. Clicking on the Signup/login button I see a message saying: This Deployment has been disabled. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly.
- benob 3y agoI wonder how an ethical board was convinced to allow this kind of research
- karencarits 3y agoIt's surprising to see that this was done in Denmark, on data on more than the million people, and I couldn't find any reference to the ethical board/approvals in the manuscript
- herval 3y agowhat's unethical about it?
- fho 3y agoThese days every time you do experiments that involve humans it's expected that you run your experiment design by your institutions ethics committee. In this case I would expect that the committee perked up their ears, but once they heard that the data was anonymous they did not have any further concerns.
- samstave 3y agoWhen I was a kid, I was involved in a study with UCSD. I grew up in California on a Commune in the 1970s very famous in the Bay area. The study with UCSD would follow a range of various people from all various socio-economic backgrounds. I first recall going to San Diego when I was 3. They would check in on me every few years up until I was 18 and I asked to leave the study. I don't recall what it was named... but it was interesting. I wont share the insights they had of me - but some of them were insulting and very wrong. This will do that at scale.
- m3kw9 3y agoDidn’t see input for astrology sign though, maybe they can make it more accurate lol
- greatpostman 3y agoOne of my rules for life: If someone does something once, they will do it twice. Given similar circumstances, people act the same
- amelius 3y agoDoes that hold for mistakes too?
- greatpostman 3y agoOfcourse
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- resource0x 3y agoUnfortunately, the rule still holds when "someone" is yourself. :-)
- IAmGraydon 3y agoWell...yes. We aren't random action generators.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- walterbell 3y agoPredictive algos have long been used for market segmentation, predating LLMs and were illustrated in WestWorld S3E3 screenshots of individual human lifespan profiles, https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-in-westworlds-episode-3-shocker-is-already-her-1842508176 https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-in-westworlds-episode-3-shocker...
- SCUSKU 3y agoPart of me wants to be able to encode my life2vec and see what the next predicted tokens are. On the other hand, as much as going to a fortune teller sounds fun to me, I worry that if I go I will simply make what they say come true since I will be anxious about what the fortune teller said. That said, my life is already on a certain track, and because I'm afraid of change, it's unlikely to be much different than it was before. Maybe this is just a weird call to actually do what your gut says, and to follow your dreams.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago> because I'm afraid of change, it's unlikely to be much different than it was before Life changing events are often out of your control
- jedberg 3y agoThat's sometimes but not always, or even often, true. You're thinking of accidents or death. But what about marriage or jobs or education or divorce? Those usually require an active choice (or many of them).
- nsagent 3y agoThat's a debated topic. See the recent book by Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will."
- jedberg 3y agoIt's true, any system is 100% deterministic when you get to a low enough level, but we can't observe it and saying so is rather pointless.
- p-e-w 3y ago> Our work has important societal and ethical implications, which we outline in the Discussion as well as in Methods, Sec. 4.1, and SI: Model Card. Maybe those ethical implications should have led to the decision not to pursue this avenue of research at all, or not to publish the results. These "ethics disclaimers" are so stupid. It's as if scientists believe that they can somehow free themselves from moral responsibility by waxing philosophical about the ethical implications of their research in an appendix. That's not how it works, folks. By choosing to publish, you have already incurred shared responsibility for whatever is built upon your work. Claiming that you have "considered" this means Jack Shit.
- junofan 3y agoStrange to see these ideas on a site called “Hacker News” given the “hacker ethic” is to make information available to all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic
- p-e-w 3y agoLike other vague, vogue philosophical concepts, the Hacker Ethic is many things to many people. To me, "every avenue of research must be pursued at any human cost, and ethics are at best an afterthought" has nothing to do with being a Hacker.
- Jimmc414 3y agoI believe this is the corresponding code: https://github.com/SocialComplexityLab/life2vec https://github.com/SocialComplexityLab/life2vec
- sinuhe69 3y ago“the most comprehensive registry data in existence, available for an entire nation of more than six million individuals across decades. Our data include information about life-events related to health, education, occupation, income, address, and working hours, recorded with day-to-day resolution.” I shuddered just reading this. What a nightmare for individuals’ freedom and privacy. What a bloody nation is that?
- woleium 3y agoHow do we build a system where there is enough trust that this data will be used for “good”?
- manofmanysmiles 3y agoAddress the problem that people have a proclivity to do "bad". Call it mental health, resolving trauma, spiritual practice. When people are no longer wounded and "broken" internally, they will go out and sculpt the outer shared physical world to match their improved internal state, and all will be good. I'm not sure this is possible, but I am sure that any attempt to control human behavior externally will fail.
- woleium 3y agoI always point towards the change in public perception towards drink driving as an example of how it’s possible to achieve significant change to society in a relatively short period of time