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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I have often banged on about "MOOP" - massive open online psychology. The idea is a form of behavioural epidemiology - we can watch through smartphones and other devices people at enormous scale - and answer questions like "do people who save 10% of their income in index linked isas have less stress / better life outcomes" or "do people who meet a mate for a drink each week live longer" ...

The answers may well surprise us, but at some point the answers will also benefit us.

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Don't we already have many answers? -- We just do nothing to address the problems.

I had ideas for exactly such an app.

Very interested in the unexpected correlations it can find, especially with respect to health.

The main trouble is how to deal with keeping it secure/private/anonymized, while also making the data open for others to run queries on.

I don't see it as one "app". It is everything. Record my conversations, who was in the room with me (bluetooth, facial recognition), which chat room was I in, was my tone of voice loud or angry when I was talking to my daughter about homework, do I do that often, how does she react. Out of 1 million parents who raise their voices discussing homework, what is the stress level of the children, the amount of times they spend doing their homework after the dinner conversation. Of 1 million children doing homework which app is most effective e for their academic success - and is their stress negative correlated with academic achievement or not?

Then take all of this and dump it toNHS / NICE researchers whom I am happy to let have this because the legal regulations are in place on supra-national levels such I know that if a data-brocker gets it they shit their pants and send it back to the government with an apology.

It's a long way off, but one day your iphone will trill in your ear and say "hi paul, I know you are angry about the tone of voice your wife used just know but she is worried about her unfinished report, and out of five million men who react the way you are about to 5 million did not get positive responses."

I've thought about this as well. I wanted to create anonymity pools and then use zero knowledge proofs to justify predicates about the entire pool.

So it would be like:

1000 participants formed 10 pools, assigned by random numbers generator. Preficatefoo was true of 19% of pool foo, 24% of pool bar...

Participants could then attest: yes, I was in pool foo. But there wouldn't be enough data to reidentify them individually.

It’s been done. The secret is to reward participants and make it long term. Check out the General Social Survey conducted by NORC. It’s one of the longest running longitudinal surveys with multiple cohorts tracking the public’s changing views on a variety of issues combined with detailed demographic data.

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