Quantify yourself (without selling your soul)

Re:Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) by sfrjay on Thursday September 19, 2013 @11:47AM (#6412365)

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.

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Re:Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) by tedks on Thursday September 19, 2013 @12:11PM (#6412523)

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.

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Re:Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) by gelnior on Thursday September 19, 2013 @12:01PM (#6412462)

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

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Re:Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) by mmagin on Thursday September 19, 2013 @01:30PM (#6412984)

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.

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