Should I conclude from my inability to find any published studies on the Internet testing this question that there is some fatal flaw in my plan that I’m just not seeing?
We report our preliminary attempts to modify these depressions by manipulating environmental lighting conditions. We have recently reported reversing depression in one patient with SAD by modifying his environmental lighting
...
The following light treatment was administered. … (1) bright, white full-spectrum fluorescent light (approximately 2,500 lux at 90 cm)
But taking a step back, the “Chesterton’s Absence of a Fence” argument doesn’t apply here because the circumstances are very different. The entire world is desperately looking for a way to stop COVID. If SAD suddenly occurred out of nowhere and affected the entire economy, you would be sure that bright lights would be one of the first things to be tested.
Dentin addresses the 1-2% claim pretty well, so I won’t repeat it.
A simple Google search shows thousands of articles addressing this very solution.
The solution in the paper you link is literally the solution Eliezer described trying, and not working:
As of 2014, she’d tried sitting in front of a little lightbox for an hour per day, and it hadn’t worked.
(Note that the “little lightbox” in question was very likely one of these, which you may notice have mostly ratings of 10,000 lux rather than the 2,500 cited in the paper. So, significantly brighter, and despite that, didn’t work.)
It does sound like you misunderstood, in other words. Knowing that light exposure is an effective treatment for SAD is indeed a known solution; this is why Eliezer tried light boxes to begin with. The point of that excerpt is that this “known solution” did not work for his wife, and the obvious next step of scaling up the amount of light used was not investigated in any of the clinical literature.
But taking a step back, the “Chesterton’s Absence of a Fence” argument doesn’t apply here because the circumstances are very different. The entire world is desperately looking for a way to stop COVID. If SAD suddenly occurred out of nowhere and affected the entire economy, you would be sure that bright lights would be one of the first things to be tested.
This is simply a (slightly) disguised variation of your original argument. Absent strong reasons to expect to see efficiency, you should not expect to see efficiency. The “entire world desperately looking for a way to stop COVID” led to bungled vaccine distribution, delayed production, supply shortages, the list goes on and on. Empirically, we do not observe anything close to efficiency in this market, and this should be obvious even without the aid of Dentin’s list of bullet points (though naturally those bullet points are very helpful).
(Question: did seeing those bullet points cause you to update at all in the direction of this working, or are you sticking with your 1-2% prior? The latter seems fairly indefensible from an epistemic standpoint, I think.)
Not only is the argument above flawed, it’s also special pleading with respect to COVID. Here is the analogue of your argument with respect to SAD:
Around 7% of the population has severe Seasonal Affective Disorder, and another 20% or so has weak Seasonal Affective Disorder. Around 50% of tested cases respond to standard lightboxes. So if the intervention of stringing up a hundred LED bulbs actually worked, it could provide a major improvement to the lives of 3% of the US population, costing on the order of $1000 each (without economies of scale). Many of those 9 million US citizens would be rich enough to afford that as a treatment for major winter depression. If you could prove that your system worked, you could create a company to sell SAD-grade lighting systems and have a large market.
SAD is not an uncommon disorder. In terms of QALYs lost, it’s… probably not directly comparable with COVID, but it’s at the very least in the same ballpark—certainly to the point where “people want to stop COVID, but they don’t care about SAD” is clearly false.
And yet, in point of fact, there are no papers describing the unspeakably obvious intervention of “if your lights don’t seem to be working, use more lights”, nor are there any companies predicated on this idea. If Eliezer had followed your reasoning to its end conclusion, he might not have bothered testing more light… except that his background assumptions did not imply the (again, fairly indefensible, in my view) heuristic that “if no one else is doing it, the only possible explanation is that it must not work, else people are forgoing free money”. And as a result, he did try the intervention, and it worked, and (we can assume) his wife’s quality of life was improved significantly as a result.
If there’s an argument that (a) applies in full generality to anything other people haven’t done before, and (b) if applied, would regularly lead people to forgo testing out their ideas (and not due to any object-level concerns, either, e.g. maybe it’s a risky idea to test), then I assert that that argument is bad and harmful, and that you should stop reasoning in this manner.
I don’t understand the argument about SAD.
A simple Google search shows thousands of articles addressing this very solution. The first Google result I found is a paper from 1984 with 2,758 citations: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/493246
But taking a step back, the “Chesterton’s Absence of a Fence” argument doesn’t apply here because the circumstances are very different. The entire world is desperately looking for a way to stop COVID. If SAD suddenly occurred out of nowhere and affected the entire economy, you would be sure that bright lights would be one of the first things to be tested.
Dentin addresses the 1-2% claim pretty well, so I won’t repeat it.
The solution in the paper you link is literally the solution Eliezer described trying, and not working:
(Note that the “little lightbox” in question was very likely one of these, which you may notice have mostly ratings of 10,000 lux rather than the 2,500 cited in the paper. So, significantly brighter, and despite that, didn’t work.)
It does sound like you misunderstood, in other words. Knowing that light exposure is an effective treatment for SAD is indeed a known solution; this is why Eliezer tried light boxes to begin with. The point of that excerpt is that this “known solution” did not work for his wife, and the obvious next step of scaling up the amount of light used was not investigated in any of the clinical literature.
This is simply a (slightly) disguised variation of your original argument. Absent strong reasons to expect to see efficiency, you should not expect to see efficiency. The “entire world desperately looking for a way to stop COVID” led to bungled vaccine distribution, delayed production, supply shortages, the list goes on and on. Empirically, we do not observe anything close to efficiency in this market, and this should be obvious even without the aid of Dentin’s list of bullet points (though naturally those bullet points are very helpful).
(Question: did seeing those bullet points cause you to update at all in the direction of this working, or are you sticking with your 1-2% prior? The latter seems fairly indefensible from an epistemic standpoint, I think.)
Not only is the argument above flawed, it’s also special pleading with respect to COVID. Here is the analogue of your argument with respect to SAD:
SAD is not an uncommon disorder. In terms of QALYs lost, it’s… probably not directly comparable with COVID, but it’s at the very least in the same ballpark—certainly to the point where “people want to stop COVID, but they don’t care about SAD” is clearly false.
And yet, in point of fact, there are no papers describing the unspeakably obvious intervention of “if your lights don’t seem to be working, use more lights”, nor are there any companies predicated on this idea. If Eliezer had followed your reasoning to its end conclusion, he might not have bothered testing more light… except that his background assumptions did not imply the (again, fairly indefensible, in my view) heuristic that “if no one else is doing it, the only possible explanation is that it must not work, else people are forgoing free money”. And as a result, he did try the intervention, and it worked, and (we can assume) his wife’s quality of life was improved significantly as a result.
If there’s an argument that (a) applies in full generality to anything other people haven’t done before, and (b) if applied, would regularly lead people to forgo testing out their ideas (and not due to any object-level concerns, either, e.g. maybe it’s a risky idea to test), then I assert that that argument is bad and harmful, and that you should stop reasoning in this manner.