D_Malik comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

[D_Malik]

Is transcranial direct current stimulation technology yet at the point where someone who starts it has higher expected gains than costs? I.e., should more LWers be using it? You can comment and/​or answer this poll:

Do you think the average LWer would get a net benefit from using tDCS, taking into account the benefits, costs of equipment, risks, etc.? [pollid:906] How much do you know about this topic? [pollid:907]

Summary of the 2008 state of the art; tDCS subreddit.

[D_Malik]

Probably gotten most of the responses it was going to get, so here’s a scatter plot:

People seem to think it’s worse the more they know about it (except those who know nothing seem slightly more pessimistic than those who know only a little).

Made by running this in IPython (after “import pandas as pd” and “from numpy.random import randn” in .pythonstartup):

!sed "/^#/d" poll.csv >poll-clean.csv
pd.read_csv("poll-clean.csv", names=["user", "pollid", "response", "date"])
_.pivot_table("response", ["user"], ["pollid"])
_ + 0.1*randn(*_.shape) # jitter
_.plot(kind="scatter", x=906, y=907)
plt.xlabel("Net loss.....Net benefit")
plt.ylabel("Nothing.....Expert")

[Manfred]

Ooh, having the raw poll data is neat.