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Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

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Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#31

Post by fleitz »

phfez wrote: post #19
blowski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who was affected by the suicide of a close friend, it would be wonderful if something existed that could help others with suicidal feelings. But there is something sad about the idea that an algorithm would be better at detecting suicidal feelings than your closest friends.

You think it would be wonderful because of the way that you felt, not the way your friend felt. And there is no algorithm that can detect suicidal feelings. I can't help but think of Alan Turing in this scenario.

Yes, if only this existed for turing, we could have thrown him in jail for not wanting to live in our bigoted society.

You hit the nail on the head, most people want a tool like this so every now and then they can stop being a shitty person for a few days before they go back to the navel gazing: "No one had talked to him in months, we had no idea he was depressed."

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#32

Post by DanBC »

This looks like a useful tool.

Assuming for the moment that this is very accurate.

What then?

Ann discovers that Bob is suicidal. What is Ann supposed to do then? (My suggestions are to ask Bob if he intends to die; and to help Bob access medical help. (Emergency help if he says he intends to die soon)).

Perhaps some set of accurate, international, flowcharts showing what you're supposed to do if a colleague / friend / relative / etc is suicidal would help. (In UK: Contact their GP; or an ambulance if suicide is in progress;)

You also seem to be ignoring ages, which is tricky. What do your ethics team say about reporting suicidality and people under 18?

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#33

Post by fleitz »

bussiere wrote: post #24

hum, interesting. Kind of minority report here. Machine learning on depression syndrome ? I'am a hacker and not truly white, are you not afraid that people used this to take advantage of depressed people ? A man can use this to spot depressed women , some are manipulator born people. I find the project interesting but it have a lot of ethic problems. I think that it will be more a tools for the people in wealth. mayb…

ML would be a huge step forward, this just matches a couple keywords.

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#34

Post by conistonwater »

jwise0 wrote: post #28
conistonwater wrote: post #26

Have you thought at all about the ethics of meddling in people's lives? [1] This "service" seems contrary to basic notions of privacy and freedom. [1] http://www.davidhume.org/texts/suis.html

The only thing the service does is alert the friends of someone who appears to be about to end their own life, but who, for some reason, is posting about it on a public forum. I can assure you that the service does no meddling whatsoever. Someone who is swept by the depths of depression, and takes a last moment to emerge long enough to ask their friends for help -- well, I think that it is only fair to counterbalance…

> alert the friends of someone who appears

That's meddling all right.

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#35

Post by rkirkendall »

[deleted] wrote: post #30
jwise0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing the service does is alert the friends of someone who appears to be about to end their own life, but who, for some reason, is posting about it on a public forum. I can assure you that the service does no meddling whatsoever. Someone who is swept by the depths of depression, and takes a last moment to emerge long enough to ask their friends for help -- well, I think that it is only fair to counterbalance…

[deleted]

Thanks for looking at the repo. A couple of things to keep in mind. - This list is only a starting point I pulled from a white paper. I agree that it does need to expand, hence the ongoing and open source nature of the project.

- If you have a suggestion for how this could be done with machine learning, please feel free to submit a pull request. Just keep in mind that the project only aims to catch language that can be reasonably interpreted as self-threatening.

Lastly, if you have a problem with how the project is implemented PRs are more productive than comments. It is far from perfect, but I believe it is still better than nothing at all.

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#36

Post by matart »

rkirkendall wrote: post #21
matart wrote: post #16

How accurate do you think this can be? What happens if I write a facebook update that says, as an example: I don't believe I have ever said "I feel depressed" Would this be flagged? Does it only take one post to be flagged or is it looking for recurring behaviour?

Good question. Part of the ongoing nature of this project is to expand our phrase detections. I pulled the original phrase list from a white paper written by BYU last year because I figured that would be a good starting point. There is room for vast improvement though. If the last few posts leading up to the flagged post are classified as predominately negative (currently looking at the last 3 tweets before the flagg…

Very interesting. Thanks for the response!

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#37

Post by rkirkendall »

jwise0 wrote: post #29

Ricky, Thanks for this service. Sometimes, all it takes is to remind someone that people are there for them, and care about them. I don't terribly like Twitter, but I try to read it once a day or so just to keep a view on how people are doing; this service would be incredibly useful to me to make sure that I don't have things that I'd like to pay attention to falling through the cracks. I know a bunch of people here…

Glad you like it! Thanks for kind words.

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#38

Post by rkirkendall »

DanBC wrote: post #32

This looks like a useful tool. Assuming for the moment that this is very accurate. What then? Ann discovers that Bob is suicidal. What is Ann supposed to do then? (My suggestions are to ask Bob if he intends to die; and to help Bob access medical help. (Emergency help if he says he intends to die soon)). Perhaps some set of accurate, international, flowcharts showing what you're supposed to do if a colleague / friend…

Good idea on the flow chart! Thanks

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#39

Post by bussiere »

bussiere wrote: post #24

hum, interesting. Kind of minority report here. Machine learning on depression syndrome ? I'am a hacker and not truly white, are you not afraid that people used this to take advantage of depressed people ? A man can use this to spot depressed women , some are manipulator born people. I find the project interesting but it have a lot of ethic problems. I think that it will be more a tools for the people in wealth. mayb…

As i said the problem that i have with this is that i could help a manipulative pervert to spot his next victim.

Allowing anyone to use it is a ethic problem for me.

Manipulative pervert have a natural tendency to spot people in weakness state you could just help them more with this ...

Take care of this, i think maybe a way to avoid this will be to give it access to people only with a good reputation.

(reputation system are a things that a lot of people are working on it).

But the project and the technology interest me.

Did you see the project go learning ?

There are some association that use phone line to help people and prevent suicide. Your product could be useful for them.

We can imagine them using it online to prevent suicide or contact people in private.

regards and i wish you to sucess.

Re: Show HN: CheckUp – Social network suicide prevention in Go

#40

Post by bussiere »

fleitz wrote: post #33
bussiere wrote: post #24

hum, interesting. Kind of minority report here. Machine learning on depression syndrome ? I'am a hacker and not truly white, are you not afraid that people used this to take advantage of depressed people ? A man can use this to spot depressed women , some are manipulator born people. I find the project interesting but it have a lot of ethic problems. I think that it will be more a tools for the people in wealth. mayb…

ML would be a huge step forward, this just matches a couple keywords.

if you need some advice on ML i will be glad to give you some.

I'am mainly use python for this but there's other solution.

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