HWAI
How Weird Am I?
(how weird are you???)
The idea for this project came out of working in this field as a data scientist for the last decade. Right now there is a ton of money being thrown around with the goal of developing "biomarkers" to improve treatment of human diseases. Often that money goes toward building datasets using cutting-edge biological platforms (VC loves anything you can put "-omics" after), to profile a study population in the range of a few hundred of people.
For some things that approach might work - if you want to help people with lupus, measuring proteins/genes/cell composition in the blood makes sense, and you might get a strong enough signal to help guide treatment. But for mental health, this won't work. To better understand and treat depression, anxiety, addictions, post-traumatic stress - gene expression in the blood is a lot less useful.
For those things, it makes more sense to build a dataset of behavioral/symptom data. Basically just ask people about their habits / personality / mental health over time. With the goal of collecting data from as many people as you can, to account for "noise" in the diversity of human brains, and collecting it over time, to account for noise from the fact that people's lives vary over time.
The funny thing is, it wouldn't cost millions of dollars to do this - it would only cost the hosting fees to run a website like this one (so far, about $10/month).
So yeah, if you took the baseline survey - awesome, you already helped build this thing that could actually help people someday. If you want to keep going and answer more questions, even better - or feel free to check back in once in a while. You can add your email and check a box if you want us to ping you in a month.
...for a long(er)-winded take on these ideas, see here.
For some things that approach might work - if you want to help people with lupus, measuring proteins/genes/cell composition in the blood makes sense, and you might get a strong enough signal to help guide treatment. But for mental health, this won't work. To better understand and treat depression, anxiety, addictions, post-traumatic stress - gene expression in the blood is a lot less useful.
For those things, it makes more sense to build a dataset of behavioral/symptom data. Basically just ask people about their habits / personality / mental health over time. With the goal of collecting data from as many people as you can, to account for "noise" in the diversity of human brains, and collecting it over time, to account for noise from the fact that people's lives vary over time.
The funny thing is, it wouldn't cost millions of dollars to do this - it would only cost the hosting fees to run a website like this one (so far, about $10/month).
So yeah, if you took the baseline survey - awesome, you already helped build this thing that could actually help people someday. If you want to keep going and answer more questions, even better - or feel free to check back in once in a while. You can add your email and check a box if you want us to ping you in a month.