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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I have a secret startup plan - MOOPs

Massive Open Online Psychology.

You wire your house with iPhones or Alexas recording your daily conversations with your family - it records things like "number of positive responses" vs "number negative responses" when replying to your spouse or children.

There are dozens of simple verbal checks one can pull out of even fairly raw speech to text, let alone visual dances.

And imagine if you had a monthly review with a therapist how had all this data at their fingertips- and could coach you and your spouse to improve the worst of it.

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This sounds like a dystopian nightmare come true

It’s all about ownership and agency. If a company gathers this data, does this analysis, and uses it for their own reasons without giving the monitored people a say - that’s a distopian nightmare. BUT as GP describes, it’s a tool within your control, helping you improve your life. That’s ok with me.

Slight tangent: somehow I cannot find it, but there is an amazing TedX video where a Google engineer tracked how his child learned words by effectively doing this and recording and tracking everyone’s voices and paths in the home. The amount of data he stored and crunched was impressive.

You may want to hit him up for his tech setup :)

Heh I remember that. Pretty sure it used the classic “force an army of grad students to manually review everything “ approach

yes. deb roy from mit media lab.

Yeah this is great. To make it scale, you need to put one additional camera in the bedroom of the parents. /s

Oh god no. Tell me this idea is a joke.

If you ignore the privacy complications, this is actually quite an interesting idea.

If someone did it, it’d likely be opt-in and only for a short, finite period (1 week?) with the data being destroyed after it’s used.

I saw a TV show many years ago where the therapist simply set up a video camera in the dining room of a family to record, every day, the family dinner. After 2 or 3 weeks, the family forgot about the camera and reverted to their normal behaviors.

After a few months of this, the therapist took the videos and then showed each member of the family how they behaved. They were horrified, and it turned out to be excellent family therapy.

It's like the best way to teach someone to be a better public speaker is to record them speaking, and play it back to them.

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