nineteenthly@yahoo.com

health: [general]

Ill medical researchers [edit, delete] Not the sequel to II medical researchers. (+1, -1) [vote for, against]

Medical research is often carried out by people who have no personal connection to the illnesses they are studying. Therefore, they are detached from what they are doing. In some ways this is a good thing. However, i have to confess that when i study a disease, i become very academically interested in it. Whereas it may motivate me to find a way of dealing with it, it's sort of "fascinating" in quite a negative way which carries with it the danger of, well, two things. It can lead me to forget the person who is suffering and the lack of first hand knowledge may lead to me missing the obvious.

Some consultants, researchers and the like do actually have illnesses with which they are engaged. For instance, there is a relatively famous bipolar academic who studies bipolar disorder, and another one on the autistic spectrum who studies her own state. I suggest that in some cases it should be a requirement of a health care professional such as an academic researcher or consultant to have a strong personal connection with their speciality before they enter the field. For instance, they may themselves have eczema, have a first-degree relative with a particular learning difficulty or a partner with Motor Neurone disease. They would then be focused on the treatment of the condition with a real experiential understanding of it, be more likely to empathise with sufferers and not come up with impractical plans which lead to poor compliance. In fact, they probably wouldn't even use the word compliance.

Clearly this is sometimes impossible, but there should at least be a tendency in that direction. nineteenthly, Jan 23 2008

The Helicobacter Foundation http://www.helico.com/ [angel, flag, delete, Jan 23 2008]

Beat The Reaper! http://en.wikipedia...or_Someone_Like_Him Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him [Amos Kito, flag, delete, Jan 23 2008]

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Summary:

Description: Medical research is often carried out by people who have no personal connection to the illnesses they are studying. Therefore, they are detached from what they are doing. In some ways this is a good thing. However, i have to confess that when i study a disease, i become very academically interested in it. Whereas it may motivate me to find a way of dealing with it, it's sort of "fascinating" in quite a negative way which carries with it the danger of, well, two things. It can lead me to forget the person who is suffering and the lack of first hand knowledge may lead to me missing the obvious. Some consultants, researchers and the like do actually have illnesses with which they are engaged. For instance, there is a relatively famous bipolar academic who studies bipolar disorder, and another one on the autistic spectrum who studies her own state. I suggest that in some cases it should be a requirement of a health care professional such as an academic researcher or consultant to have a strong personal connection with their speciality before they enter the field. For instance, they may themselves have eczema, have a first-degree relative with a particular learning difficulty or a partner with Motor Neurone disease. They would then be focused on the treatment of the condition with a real experiential understanding of it, be more likely to empathise with sufferers and not come up with impractical plans which lead to poor compliance. In fact, they probably wouldn't even use the word compliance. Clearly this is sometimes impossible, but there should at least be a tendency in that direction.

Well, it worked for Barry Marshall (linky). angel, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

But if one of them should accidentally die, you'd only have one hundred and ten medical researchers. Ian Tindale, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

... sitting on a wall. Jinbish, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

[Ian Tindale], C¦N>K! nineteenthly, Jan 23 2008 [edit, delete]

Fantastic, unless they're suffering from something very contagious, in which case the results of the clinical trials might be skewed. hippo, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

"He's coming around and ready to play symptom six of Beat The Reaper!" [link] Amos Kito, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

Is this not just a "let's all", as sweet as it is? globaltourniquet, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

Doctor: I have some good news and some bad news. Procrastinator: What's the good news? Doctor: You have been awarded funding to research malignant brain tumors for six months. Procrastinator: And the bad news? Doctor: You also have exactly that long to live. rcarty, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

//let's all ... - the author wants something some people are already doing//

It's only being done so far as i know by the bipolar and the autistic spectrum people. The Helicobacter pylori man was already a researcher when he decided to infect himself. It doesn't apply to physical ailments that the people already have so far as i know.

//... but doesn't provide a novel idea, invention or mechanism to allow it to be more widely practiced.//

The mechanism is that it is a qualifying condition to do the research or be, say, a dermatologist, so for instance it would be in the job description, the resume/CV or asked during the interview. nineteenthly, Jan 23 2008 [edit, delete]

I'm sorry, nineteenthly, but I agree that this is a let's all. That doesn't mean that it's a bad sentiment or not worth pushing for, just that it's not quite a halfbakery invention. It's a preference within an existing spectrum of cold, hard science vs. passionate emotional involvement. Using the position on that spectrum as a precondition for hiring is just one way of enforcing that preference.

[marked-for deletion] let's all.

Free association: I think it would be cool if you could get a life insurance policy that converts to stipends for people to study preventing whatever it was that killed you. jutta, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

I'm not sure this is a great idea, for two reasons. (The idea seems to confuse clinicians with researchers - I'm talking here only about researchers since I don't know as much about clinicians.)

First, if the aim is to do the best in terms of research, then you want the best researchers. The number of people who really drive a field forward can usually be counted on the fingers of two hands - they are very rare people. What you're looking for when you put together a research team is simply the very best person you can find. It is stupid to discriminate on the basis of race or gender (for instance) because discrimination on the basis of ability is all that counts, and leaves you no real room to pick and choose. Likewise, discriminating on the basis of having the disease (or not) is a distraction.

Second, the idea sort of supposes that someone with the disease will be better motivated. (I appreciate that there's also an aspect of empathy, but to be honest that is not often useful in research, however valuable it may be in medicine.) Yes, someone who has HIV may well be totally committed, and will be in the lab at 3am on New Year's Day. But passion doesn't come solely from having a personal connection to the disease. I have people who are at the bench at 3am because they are passionate about the science - this is an equally powerful and much more common driving factor. MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 23 2008 [delete]

... shoulder mech Sock-em Robot (+5, -1) SprayOn Nervous System (+3, -2) Strobot The Halfth Law of Robotics (+1, -6)(+1, -6) Thingamajuggler (+1) Tubot (+7, -2) Unibot unturning robots (+3) ...

product: robot

The Halfth Law of Robotics [edit, delete] ~(Head asplode) (+1, -6)(+1, -6) (+1, -6) [vote for, against]

Factoid one: If a robot perceives a paradox, its head will explode. Factoid two: The First Law of Robotics: A robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. Therefore, a robot may not allow its head to explode until it or a human has retreated to a safe distance.

However, the Second Law of Robotics states that a robot must obey orders given by a human except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Therefore, if a human orders a robot not to allow its head to explode, it cannot allow that to happen. However, this is itself a paradox and if a robot realises this, its head will explode (or not).

Moreover, the third law states that a robot must protect its own existence.

Therefore, a robot cannot allow itself to perceive a paradox.

Hence the robot must find a solution to this in order to obey the Laws of Robotics.

I suggest that the robot cannot allow itself to perceive information directly. It must first be filtered to remove paradoxes. The robot would have an additional layer between itself and the external environment, which detects potential paradoxes and does not pass them on to the robot. This would not violate the laws because paradoxical orders cannot be obeyed.

Thus, the Halfth Law of Robotics: A robot's head must not explode on perceiving a contradiction. nineteenthly, Feb 22 2008

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Summary:

Description: Factoid one: If a robot perceives a paradox, its head will explode. Factoid two: The First Law of Robotics: A robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. Therefore, a robot may not allow its head to explode until it or a human has retreated to a safe distance. However, the Second Law of Robotics states that a robot must obey orders given by a human except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Therefore, if a human orders a robot not to allow its head to explode, it cannot allow that to happen. However, this is itself a paradox and if a robot realises this, its head will explode (or not). Moreover, the third law states that a robot must protect its own existence. Therefore, a robot cannot allow itself to perceive a paradox. Hence the robot must find a solution to this in order to obey the Laws of Robotics. I suggest that the robot cannot allow itself to perceive information directly. It must first be filtered to remove paradoxes. The robot would have an additional layer between itself and the external environment, which detects potential paradoxes and does not pass them on to the robot. This would not violate the laws because paradoxical orders cannot be obeyed. Thus, the Halfth Law of Robotics: A robot's head must not explode on perceiving a contradiction.

But you forgot the 0th law, which changes everything! jhomrighaus, Feb 22 2008 [delete]

There is also a hole in your logic as the laws are nested, the first(or 0th) law takes precedence over the higher laws, thus a robot may not protect itself if a human may come to harm, by the existing laws a robot could not resolve the paradox UNTIL they could do so without harming a human. Contradiction between between the laws does not cause a paradox for robot and to be honest I'm not sure how one would structure a situation in which such a paradox could occur. The 3 laws combined are incredibly powerful and elegant, the addition of the 4th law creates all kinds of scary situations however. jhomrighaus, Feb 22 2008 [delete]

.....?

You've defined "Factoid one", which i'm pretty sure i've only seen in looney-tunes, and then you proceed to show how Asimov's three laws prevent this from being okay, and as such, you make an addendum to Asimov's laws to make it impossible? whaaa? Additionally, i would like to suggest that there is no reason for any logic problems or paradoxes to cause a computer to explode. Few things on normal computer hardware can explode under any conditions (capicators and transistors are my favorite to blow up with mains power), so unless your robots are built with self destruct explosives (and this seems unlikely, given the first two laws), there is no reason, under any circumstances, that a properly manufactured robot will explode because of a logical problem - instead, it would do what my computer does when a programmer made a stupid mistake - reboot or freeze. //Therefore, a robot cannot allow itself to perceive a paradox.// - If you are "pre-processing" the inputs to the robot to clean them up of paradoxes, wouldn't the paradox detection software be at least as complex and involved as the regular processing? What will protect the preprocessor? what about a pre-preprocessor? ericscottf, Feb 22 2008 [delete]

Your factoid seems a little "Straw man" to me. "I Robot", the book, not the movie, pretty much beat to death all the issues with the laws. The biggest being the definision of harm. You are trying to create a new one by introducing a factoid and assuming then that the ensuing explosion could put the human at risk, so sorry I can't agree (-). MisterQED, Feb 22 2008 [delete]

This is basically silly, of course, but there is a slightly more serious side to it. Clearly a robot's brain is unlikely to blow up literally if this happens (and it came from Star Trek where the robots are supposedly positronic, i.e. Asimovian, so it really is a problem in the Star Trek universe), but there could be a whole load of circumstances in which a robot would harm a human being. For instance, if one falls out of a window, anyone underneath it at the time will get harmed, so what's it going to do? Is it going to have a built in jet pack to stop this from happening, just on the offchance? What if someone takes its arm off and hits someone else with it? What if it accidentally electrocutes someone due to faulty wiring?

What i'm trying to say is that they aren't plausible in any way. nineteenthly, Feb 22 2008 [edit, delete]

I agree that those laws aren't plausible. Making them plausible is possible - legal codes do that kind of thing - but wouldn't be interesting, because it'll put your readers to sleep, even if you're Isaac Asimov.

[marked-for-deletion] Not an invention. jutta, Feb 22 2008 [delete]

Fairly obviously, a robot is not responsible for things that happen beyond its control. In the context of a robot falling from a height, its programming would cause it to attempt to avoid hitting people, and to continue this attempt until impact.

I don't see a contradiction, in any case: Robot is ordered not to explode. Obeying this command results in no explosion, no damage to humans and the continued existence of the robot, thereby simultaneously fulfilling the requirements of all three laws.

As [JH] pointed out, the laws are nested. There is therefore a priority structure. Unless two of the laws have equal priority, there cannot be a conflict between them.