Miscellaneous Research Thread

It is popular in some communities to attribute ME/CFS to "deconditioning", "unhelpful illness beliefs", and various kinds of "stress".

In this piece in Slate Barry Marshall, the researcher who discovered the cause of ulcers, says the following:

A lot of these things that are supposedly caused by stress, you try to track down the reason for that link, and there isn’t one, except the fact that we don’t have any better cause. Everything that’s supposedly caused by stress, I tell people there’s a Nobel Prize there if you find out the real cause.
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That seems likely in our case.

Also a reminder to read about ulcers in @ME/CFS Science Blog's excellent blog series about psychosomatic medicine, who apparently already have discovered this quote.

Edit: This quote also seems relevant to us:

Are you saying that there was no basically no empirical evidence to support the stress-and-acid hypothesis?
You can always find stress in someone’s life if you want to. You ask a few questions and eventually it’s, “Yes, I admit, I was worried about something recently.” So they tried to find evidence for stress causing ulcers, and whenever they had an experiment which worked, it would just be blown out of all proportion, and everyone would get so much publicity out of it that you would think, “Ah, at last, it’s proven.” But the data was very bad. And in fact there was plenty of evidence showing that stress didn’t make much difference.
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Liie said:
It is popular in some communities to attribute ME/CFS to "deconditioning", "unhelpful illness beliefs", and various kinds of "stress".

In this piece in Slate Barry Marshall, the researcher who discovered the cause of ulcers, says the following:



That seems likely in our case.

Also a reminder to read about ulcers in @ME/CFS Science Blog's excellent blog series about psychosomatic medicine, who apparently already have discovered this quote.

Edit: This quote also seems relevant to us:
Click to expand...
What's ironic is that one of the most important features of intelligence is the ability to generalize knowledge. This is something LLMs struggle with, and why they had to look at millions of pictures of dogs of all sorts of races from all sorts of angles and different lighting and do the same with any other type of dog-looking animal, while a child can see a handful of dogs and nail it right away.

And on this medicine is showing a total inability work it out. The profession is showing less ability to generalize knowledge than the current state of LLMs.

Because this is a generalizable problem. What happened to ulcers is what happened to a lot of other conditions and the features and context are exactly the same. But this one has a crooked ear, and so isn't identified as a dog. This other one had a ball in its mouth, and it hadn't seen that before.

The social intelligence aspect seems broken here. Instead of being more than the sum of its parts, it's significantly worse. Ironically, there is a problem of alignment here, one of the most significant topics in AI. "What if the AI has a different agenda than those who use it?" Well, we know how it fails miserably when humans are out of alignment.

As if we can master AI alignment while human alignment is mostly out of whack.
 
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