The blinded aspect is hard.
If you’re concerned about supplement interactions, you should be concerned about supplements effects at all. People should seek based on possible luck, but should know (and be able to tell doctors) what they’re putting into their bodies, and take contextual advice from relatives, friends, and community.
Collecting individuals susceptible to effective treatment with intervention X and having them ready for researchers to talk to, test more directly—is this already done? I suppose around individual notable conditions: celiac disease and gluten intolerance, or n=1 genetic issue self-diagnosis.
Some conditions have an intermittency, that makes it hard to assess interventions with unknown timing.
Perhaps blinded timing studies, self-studies, after something is found to work. Perhaps helping people to log and journal symptoms and effects during the blinded periods, as well as analyze, interpret, and share them—especially in ways that make it easier for others to trust.
Yes, benefit corporation were created to provide an alternative to “shareholder primacy”, otherwise widely accepted in law and custom, per Wikipedia: Benefit_corporation#Differences_from_traditional_corporations. Further quoting:
Registering as a Public Benefit corporation means that they, the board of directions of the corporation, can’t be sued for failing to maximize shareholder value, and potentially could be challenged if they “fail to consider the effect decisions on stakeholders beyond shareholders.”
It would be interesting if they filed as a certified benefit corporation, B Corp, but I’m not sure what would be at stake if they failed to live up to that standard. Perhaps B Lab (non-profit who certified B Corps), or a similar new entity, should endeavor to create a new status for recognizing safe and responsible creation, handling and governance controls of powerful AIs. With external certifications one worries about Goodhard’s law, and “safety-washing” to take the place of “green-washing”, especially given the (current) non-enforceability of B Corp standards.
Do you find OpenAI’s LP entity more credible? Do you have ideas about another legal structure?