Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) | Hacker News Reader

Quantify yourself (without selling your soul)

wired.co.uk

42 pointsaenario6 comments

The problem with the 'quantified self' is that more information doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Even in cases where the stakes are high and information seems essential, like pregnancy and childbirth, more monitoring isn't better. That's true of 'routine' ultrasound monitoring during pregnancy (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199309163291201) as well as heartbeat monitoring during birth (http://evidencebasedbirth.com/evidence-based-fetal-monitorin...).

What does work is identifying cases where there is genuine cause for concern - symptoms for healthcare patients, lack of ability to complete tasks for procrastinators - and collecting the data needed to determine if/when intervention is required.

The challenge for the quantified-selfers will be to sort the signal from the noise.

You are right. I worked as BI consultant before. In our company the three main challenges we had were :

* collecting data * having clean data * extracting the right indicators and analytics from the data

I think the problems remain the sames with QS. Actual QS solutions lack of interoperability, do not really allow experimentations and do wrong about privacy. That's why Cozy could help: it allows to build data collectors in a few hours, a data browser is available to clean wrong data, and the best of all it allows anyone to hack new stuff on top of this new set of data without compromising privacy.

disclaimer: Cozy member

QS is a good idea, but I doubt the time has come for it yet.

It's a basic fact of life that you make better decisions with more information available, presuming you can think about that information sanely.

Humans generate lots of information, and computers can capture and record that information. It seems like there has to be some intersection, where we can write programs that help us make decisions.

That's not totally there yet, but it doesn't make monitoring bad. The worst case is that the data isn't useful right now.

In particular, I think there are some dangerous side effects of collecting too much data for those of certain personality types or those prone to certain mental illness (OCD, compulsive hoarding, etc.) Besides the cost of collecting more data, there are costs related to its (negative) impact on the decision-making process.

I met one of the co-founders of this at a QS meetup in Paris. I'm surprised to see this here, because he had the fanatical privacy zeal that you typically see with people making projects like this that go nowhere. It's fantastic that they're making progress; I think this technology is vital if we're ever going to escape digital feudalism.

Is this supposed to be an aggregator of QS data or a privacy tool so that you don't store this data on the cloud?

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