https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/9613/explainable-ai-and-trust-issues/

AI researchers exploring ways to increase trust in AI recognize that one barrier to trust, often, is a lack of explanation. This recognition has led to the development of the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In their paper Formalizing Trust in Artificial Intelligence, Jacovi et al. classify an AI system as trustworthy to a contract if it is capable of maintaining this contract: A recommender algorithm might be trusted to make good recommendations, and a classification algorithm might be trusted to classify things appropriately. When a classification algorithm makes grossly inappropriate classifications, we feel betrayed, and the algorithm loses our trust. (Of course, a system may be untrustworthy even as we continue to place trust in it.) This essay explores current legal implementations of XAI as they relate to explanation, trust, and human data subjects (e.g. users of Google or Facebook)—while forecasting outcomes relevant to XAI.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8701/the-path-to-controlling-cancer/

Treating cancer is a battle against exponential growth of mutating cells, so even breakthrough drugs may offer only incremental increases in survival time before residual tumors rebound. But as we learn more about the fundamental mechanisms of cancer, we can target those processes more directly. When will people diagnosed with the most lethal cancers more often than not survive for years? I will examine progress in cancer treatment and speculate on the path toward managing intractable cancer types.

Why are several-year survival rates the currency of progress in fighting cancer? It is easy to wonder, especially if you have a personal connection to cancer, why we keep seeing breakthroughs that result in a small bump in survival times rather than cures. In short, cancer cells are human cells and they evolve. It is easy to kill cancer cells, but difficult to kill them without destroying the patient’s body. And it is extremely difficult to kill every one of them before they evolve again.

Most mutations either have no effect or they kill the cell and therefore self-correct. Even when mutations self-perpetuate against all odds, the body has many defenses against them. The chances of a combination of mutations evading all this is vanishingly small, but there are trillions of opportunities for it to happen in the body. By the time it is diagnosed, a tumor has already bested a solid wall of defenses.

That means there is no easy fix for cancer, and a variety of treatments are used—primarily different types of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. The relative importance of each of these will continue to evolve.

https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8702/the-promise-and-impact-of-the-next-generation-of-weight-loss-drugs/

Obesity is a burden on individuals and on society, but it has historically been hard to treat. Until recently, weight loss approaches based on diet/lifestyle and drugs struggled to produce safe and sustainable weight loss of greater than 5% of body weight on average. That is changing with the development of highly effective, and apparently safe, new weight loss drugs. Which drugs will make it to patients, when will they arrive, who will have access to them, and how will they impact public health?

Forty-three percent of US adults have obesity, and this number has continued to increase over the last four decades, despite the fact that two-thirds of this group attempts weight loss each year. Although US obesity rates are higher than most other countries, obesity is common in the majority of wealthy countries and its prevalence is increasing nearly everywhere.