
Quantify yourself (without selling your soul) - aenario
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/18/two-frenchmen-help-you-quantify-yourself
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sfrjay
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](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199309163291201))
as well as heartbeat monitoring during birth
([http://evidencebasedbirth.com/evidence-based-fetal-
monitorin...](http://evidencebasedbirth.com/evidence-based-fetal-
monitoring/)).

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.

~~~
tedks
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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tedks
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.

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_stuart
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?

