GaiaBasicThe idea
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.
Two directions
- 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.
Open questions
This is the least developed project. The main open question is whether such a tool would really be used in daily medical practice, or whether its value is mainly in research and in making the debate clearer.
Status
Concept and simulation design. Next step: implement the required GaiaBasic components and publish the code and results here.
Related: Concepts · Documentation.