One issue that seems more likely to be problematic when the web application is being created and launched than later on, is whether the questions are well designed. There’s a whole area of expertise that goes into creating scales that are reliable, valid, and discriminative. One possibility is to construct them from scratch from first principles, and then make them publicly available, but another possibility is to find the best of what exists already that is open sourced.
For general biotics and meal squares it seems like some measure of “not having a happy tummy” is a relevant thing to measure. If soylent gets in on the process they might have a similar interest?
A little bit of googling turned up the Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale. It has 15 items (which might be too many?) and it is interview based (so hard to fit into an automated system). The really nice thing was that I could find a PDF and it all looked pretty basic.
I’m feeling like in this situation, I can safely say “I love standards, there are so many to choose from”! One of the things that turned up in my searches that seems like a really useful “meta find” is the Proqolid Clinital Outcomes Assessment database but it requires membership to use the internal search function and I need to pause to grab some dinner.
I’m feeling like in this situation, I can safely say “I love standards, there are so many to choose from”
Getting a list of LessWrong approved questions would be awesome. Both because I think the LW list will be higher quality than a lot of what’s out there, and because I feel question choice is one of the free variables we shouldn’t leave in the hands of the corporation performing the test.
I am confused. Shouldn’t the questions depend on the content of the study being performed? Which would depend (very specifically) on the users/clients? Or am I missing something?
I am hopeful that at minimum we can create guidelines for selecting questions.
I also think that some standardized health & safety questions by product category would be good (for nutritional supplements I would personally be interested in seeing data for nausea, diarrhea, weight change, stress/mood, and changes in sleep quality).
For productivity solutions I’d be curious about effects on social relationships, and other changes in relaxation activities.
Within a given product category, I’m also hopeful we can reuse a lot of questions. Soylent’s test and Mealsquares’ test shouldn’t require significantly different questions.
One issue that seems more likely to be problematic when the web application is being created and launched than later on, is whether the questions are well designed. There’s a whole area of expertise that goes into creating scales that are reliable, valid, and discriminative. One possibility is to construct them from scratch from first principles, and then make them publicly available, but another possibility is to find the best of what exists already that is open sourced.
For general biotics and meal squares it seems like some measure of “not having a happy tummy” is a relevant thing to measure. If soylent gets in on the process they might have a similar interest?
A little bit of googling turned up the Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale. It has 15 items (which might be too many?) and it is interview based (so hard to fit into an automated system). The really nice thing was that I could find a PDF and it all looked pretty basic.
A 2006 paper by van Zanten tipped me off to the existence of:
The Glasgow Dyspepsia Severity Scale
The Leeds Dyspepsia Questionnaire (public domain, with a Mandarin version!)
The Severity of Dyspepsia Assessment
The Nepean Dyspepsia Index
I’m feeling like in this situation, I can safely say “I love standards, there are so many to choose from”! One of the things that turned up in my searches that seems like a really useful “meta find” is the Proqolid Clinital Outcomes Assessment database but it requires membership to use the internal search function and I need to pause to grab some dinner.
Thank you for posting this!
Getting a list of LessWrong approved questions would be awesome. Both because I think the LW list will be higher quality than a lot of what’s out there, and because I feel question choice is one of the free variables we shouldn’t leave in the hands of the corporation performing the test.
I am confused. Shouldn’t the questions depend on the content of the study being performed? Which would depend (very specifically) on the users/clients? Or am I missing something?
I am hopeful that at minimum we can create guidelines for selecting questions.
I also think that some standardized health & safety questions by product category would be good (for nutritional supplements I would personally be interested in seeing data for nausea, diarrhea, weight change, stress/mood, and changes in sleep quality).
For productivity solutions I’d be curious about effects on social relationships, and other changes in relaxation activities.
Within a given product category, I’m also hopeful we can reuse a lot of questions. Soylent’s test and Mealsquares’ test shouldn’t require significantly different questions.
I’m not sure whether Lesswrong approval is the way to go. In the outside world few people care about Lesswrong.
I think if the project is in a later stage it might make sense to mail a bunch of domain experts and ask them for guidance.
I could also imagine using biology.stackexchange as a platform to discuss which tests should be used for a specific issue.