Doctors constantly make decisions that trade one kind of suffering for another: pain against side effects, a short intense treatment against a long mild one. These decisions rely on implicit assumptions about how experiences add up. This project explores whether the tools of GaiaBasic, especially valence accounting, could make those assumptions explicit and support better decisions.
This project is oriented to:
- Decision support. Represent the expected experiences of a patient under each option and compare them with explicit rules for intensity and duration.
- Surveys for measuring sentience in humans. Design questionnaires that measure how people weigh different experiences, to calibrate the models with real data. Research such as Bad Is Stronger Than Good (Baumeister and colleagues) suggests that negative experiences weigh more than positive ones of similar size, which any model would have to take into account.
Recent Comments