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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#181

Post by aylmao »

derrida wrote: post #164
mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle Am…

^ agree with this.

Also, we should really focus on getting people on board with the life-preserving tech that currently exists (medicine, water treatment, doctor training, etc) before developing new (and potentially expensive) tech that will only widen the gap between what the rich can do that the poor can only dream of.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#182

Post by TheRealmccoy »

Every year, there are millions of people who suffer from life threatening diseases like cancer. The statistics refer to only that single person, who is suffering; but the truth is the close family members and friends also suffer, along with the patient.

Usually, they are left to fend alone with their suffering, as it is very difficult for them to share their true feelings with others, because people who are not in their shoes are not actually able to comprehend them.

How does it impacts the patient's care,well-being and recovery? What can we do more to make society more empathetic towards these people? How does this impact economically overall?

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#183

Post by ethbro »

dineshp2 wrote: post #152

Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry. It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but w…

This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as possible to effect real change. Things that play out across a long timespan (relative to a human lifespan) are an excellent opportunity to accomplish that.

Education: We've had teacher-run schools. We've more recently had test/metric run schools. Let's (in the US) finally try and effectively fuse those two into better outcomes per dollar for kids in public schools. My personal pet peeve: develop a modeling technique that predicts an "average" educational outcome for a student given his or her family's socioeconomic status and other inputs. Then at least we have a basis for a fair measure of teacher success -- no teacher can turn every child who grows up without a single book in the home into Albert Einstein or Marie Curie.

Economics: Post-scarcity minimum / basic income, as mentioned.

Democracy: Follow on and unify the various open-* voter information efforts (example: http://votesmart.org/ ) and find the best and most unbiased way to communicate that. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, and we can do much better than throwing our hands up and letting the most ad buys have the strongest influence.

Nutrition: There's a huge amount of bogus advice out there. Synthesizing this into actionable, individualized suggestions and helping people eat healthier by unifying food and recipes with budget. Eating healthier for one day does you no great help -- eating slightly better for your entire life does.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#184

Post by HandleTheJandal »

gonehome wrote: post #140

Academic research/funding is broken - it'd be cool if there was a way to create something to fix the incentives. I think that's kind of the goal of YC research in a narrow sense, but it'd be interesting if there was a way to align the incentives so scientists collaborated more instead of hiding research so they don't get 'scooped'. At this same time this could get rid of the academic journals that charge huge amounts…

Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a system that promotes accuracy of information.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#185

Post by sandGorgon »

peteretep wrote: post #137
lhh wrote: post #16

Nutrition. A lot of this might just be meta-research, but I feel like we still don't really understand what an optimal diet looks like, and if optimal diet might differ from person to person. We learn more every day about how big of a factor it is in disease processes, especially the two biggest ones in the US - heart disease and cancer. I think preventive care in general is a great area to dive into, and this seems…

Not only that, it's hard to think of an area with quite so much "common sense" and "bro science", but also an area that should be so easy to research. Take people away on a residential and you can control exactly what they eat, their exercise etc. One of the nice things is that it'd be hard for anyone to patent findings either (I imagine). If I ever have enough money to dabble in my own research, it'll be there. How…

Agree on this. Especially research on Soylent like nutrition products for third world countries. Or the cheapest way to build muscle. Or a Crossfit alternative that's free and does not need equipment.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#188

Post by aylmao »

dineshp2 wrote: post #152

Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry. It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but w…

Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model.

Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a couple hundred bucks, instead of a notebook, pencil and early morning.

Idk, I don't see online education as any more than just a sometimes-useful alternative.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#189

Post by JoshTriplett »

derrida wrote: post #164
mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle Am…

> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death?

We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually, rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll do something about it.

> [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.

All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging. It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that will buy us enough time for the next such improvement, and the next.)

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