Let’s give people with winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, SAD) LOTS OF LIGHT and see what happens!
This is an update to my previous post that said that our preprint is out. :) The paper was accepted with very minor changes, so you might already know what it says if you saw the first post.
Here is the link to the paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/da.23281
Here is the twitter thread explaining the paper: https://twitter.com/FabienneSand/status/1561060644803252224
Again, Jan Brauner and I are very thankful to the LessWrong/EA communities, which have inspired this first study (there will be more) and through which we have found funding. In particular, thank you Eliezer Yudkowsky for helping us find funding and for inspiring the study with Inadequate Equilibria, David Chapman for inspiring us with these two posts in the Meaningness blog, Raemon for inspiring us with this LessWrong post and everyone who discussed with us setups they have tried. <3
Congratulations!
hehe Inadequate Equilibria is one of my favorite books ever, so I’m really glad that this study came up. It proves not only the SAD-specific section of the book, but the overall point.
Doesn’t this study find that LOTS OF LIGHT works about as well as SAD boxes? Restricting to the 6 datapoints at or above 2,000 lux (the figure mentioned in inadequate equilibria) does seem to give a stronger average response, but I’ve not tried to figure out whether it’s well-powered enough in the 6 datapoint regime