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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?

#461

Post by beefman »

* Macroeconomics

Attempt a blank-slate reboot of macroeconomics. Using data, build a framework for evaluating macroeconomic models. Develop and test models without prejudice.

Human civilization operates at a higher power density than the core of the sun. We should understand it. But economics is stuck a natural philosophy, and most of it is actually anti-knowledge.

Success here will unfortunately require significant effort (10-15%) be spent on evangelism, including criticism of existing economics.

The main consumer of economics is government and there are strong incentives to exaggerate the effectiveness (either positive or negative) of economic theories and policies based on them.

You will have to work very hard to avoid politicization.

Recent work in thermodynamics (Tim Garrett, Jeremy England) may be helpful on the theory side; machine learning on the empirical side. To get financial data, homomorphic encryption: https://numer.ai

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

#462

Post by beefman »

CptJamesCook wrote: post #426

IQ, and how to increase it Acne, and how to treat it The energy of a human being, and how to improve it (without stimulants) Baldness, and how to cure it

If there were a drug for motivation, that would be a big win. Many people suffer from procrastination, and it seems to me plausibly implicated in poverty.

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

#463

Post by r0s »

Cognitive science and human computer interface research.

1) Every problem you're working on will be improved by better learning systems.

2) The direct challenger to AI's potential is human augmentation. There's an evolving hardware component to that, but the software needs to keep up, and we can greatly benefit from that now.

We're still reading, thinking and learning with computers as if they were books. That has to change. I want to fully realize that potential, I consider it the most valuable contribution I can make in my lifetime. I would jump at the opportunity to fully invest myself in that goal. Please contact me for a deeper conversation.

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

#464

Post by visualsearchsv »

zo1 wrote: post #335
visualsearchsv wrote: post #58

Large Scale Medical Data Mining research, similar to OpenAI. Specifically Computational Healthcare a Search and Aggregation Engine for Medical Records & Claims. We believe that this is a classic Software eating the world situation and the time is perfect for it. Here is the link http://www.computationalhealthcare.com We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million pati…

>" We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million patients (~10% of US population) this includes all Inpatient, ED, Ambulatory Surgery records between 2006-2011 from California " Not to put a spanner in your works, as I agree your goal is worthy of a lot of effort from the general public. But, how exactly did you get access to this data, and is it legal? Additionally,…

Hi zo1, its perfectly legal, in fact the entire program (HCUP) is carried out by the US federal government agency itself (Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research) for last two decades. We have only made the system available internally to a select group of doctors who sign agreements with the US government. Misuse of this data is punishable by a felony. I have personally met the director of the agency and they know about it, and have seen a demo.

Regarding your point second point, the patient ownership of the data is not very well understood legally. Since most of it is transactional in nature. E.g. consider the Sorrell vs IMS Health judgement by the Supreme Court few years ago. Following paper in Harvard Journal of Law and Technology gives a good overview of the issues.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v25/25HarvJLTech69....

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

#465

Post by r0s »

edanm wrote: post #409

Mind uploading. It's definitely far off. But it seems to me this could be an amazing shortcut/hack to achieve a lot of other things here: once we have mind uploading, we've basically conquered death. We can also probably figure out, at that stage, how to run the minds faster or with extra memory or something, increasing the standard human intelligence. This is also a way to achieve "superintelligence" via human-based…

Like a transporter on Star Trek, I'm afraid there would be no upload without a copy. Could we really then delete the original?

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

#466

Post by brudgers »

+ Real property. Nearly all research is driven by commercial concerns. Detroit and New Orleans show how brittle that approach is statistically for events we can anticipate because of the scale at which urbanization is occurring.

+ Ubiquitous production of computational artifacts. The analogy I started with was photography: that computing is in an age when heavy equipment, toxic chemicals, glass plates, and holding still for a long time are barriers. But I've since pushed the analogy further back: maybe to oil portraits, or paintings on tomb walls, or perhaps Cromagnon caves by firelight. Now the world is flooded with images.

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

#467

Post by visualsearchsv »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #378
zo1 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million patients (~10% of US population) this includes all Inpatient, ED, Ambulatory Surgery records between 2006-2011 from California " Not to put a spanner in your works, as I agree your goal is worthy of a lot of effort from the general public. But, how exactly did you get access to this data, and is it legal? Additionally,…

By suitably modifying queries to make them "differentially private" (technical term), one can allow queries on the data set which have an arbitrarily low probability of releasing personal information. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/74339/dwork_tamc.pdf Building a database which can be locked down to differentially private primitives (differential privacy composes) would allow researchers to partially unlock this…

We do something similar. We precompute/aggregate exhaustively by following certain aggregation strategies. The aggregated statistics are further processed to ensure privacy.

Differential Privacy cannot be directly applied since the underlying assumptions are too strong. An important consideration is that the error/noise added is independent of the answer. Which means that the system becomes unusable for almost all queries other than general trends.

By restricting the query structure, we no longer need large amount of noise. Privacy of hospitals and providers is also very important and cannot be encoded in the Differential Privacy framework. Again this is still a hotly debated issue. But even the most vocal supporters of differential privacy agree that it might not be directly applicable for healthcare domain.

Following are some of the paper that discuss this:

http://www.openu.ac.il/personal_sites/tamirtassa/download/co...

http://www.jetlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Bambauer_Fi...

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

#468

Post by beefman »

losvedir wrote: post #128

Low cost, high density housing that's safe, clean, and comfortable. I think this goes hand in hand with the basic income research: what good is a basic income if any decent housing is more expensive than the income? (Alternatively: how do we fund basic income when the basic cost of living is so high?) I think there's a lot of ways housing could be made cheaper via building materials and techniques, architecture, tech…

Housing is expensive because it's a positional good, not because it's expensive to produce.

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

#469

Post by visualsearchsv »

Thriptic wrote: post #420
visualsearchsv wrote: post #58

Large Scale Medical Data Mining research, similar to OpenAI. Specifically Computational Healthcare a Search and Aggregation Engine for Medical Records & Claims. We believe that this is a classic Software eating the world situation and the time is perfect for it. Here is the link http://www.computationalhealthcare.com We have access to almost 130 Million de-identified medical records from approximately 36 Million pati…

Is this data publicly available or have you made arrangements with a hospital group?

This data is available through Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality HCUP project. Getting access to it is straightforward if you are affiliated with a teaching hospital and/or a university. There might even be some researcher at your institute who already has access to it. Getting access to it as a private entity (E.g. a startup) is more challenging and often requires a stricter review.

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

#470

Post by jashephe »

reasonattlm wrote: post #372
jashephe wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen…

These are all arguments that apply to the house you live in, the blankets on your bed, the medicine you use. You are absolutely fine with all of those - you don't live in a cave, shun treatment for infectious disease, and wear furs. In fact I would go so far as to say that you probably think that modern technology is a good thing, and you are better off for it. Yet that already greatly manipulates your proposed optim…

It may not have been expressed the most clearly, but the intention was not quite as you describe. Shelter, clothing, and modern medicine all confer enhanced fitness — I was attempting to suggest that increased lifespan does not.
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