markroseman

Speaking as a daily TaskPaper user, this looks great! I totally get why you're doing the things you're doing with this, implementation-wise, and what you're able to achieve because of it.

Having said that, you know very well what a tough sell it is the more general purpose a tool is, and this is very general purpose. I hope having it out there spurs some ideas around how the novel features of this infrastructure can be the basis for some more concrete and easier to market solutions.

Has anything improved recently for RM2 around secure sync to a LAN? Would like to experiment with one for my psychiatrist wife to replace her paper chart notes, but anything hitting an external cloud service is out of the question for patient information. Sync via cable would be too obtrusive. And I gather handwriting recognition etc. is done via cloud.

Off topic, but one of my CS professors was part of the original Simula group. Had long sinced moved onto more formalized approaches, i.e., denotational semantics. On more than one occasion was heard to say "the only good object is a dead object."

I agree. There's not a chance that it will be enough to change practice at this early stage, but it will be interesting.

On the other hand, there are so many opportunities for experimental design limiting the applicability of results in mental health experiments, that sample size and distribution doesn't even begin to touch on it. Bottom line: getting a meaningful result that is widely applicable is a horrendously complex undertaking.

Simplistic in the extreme, especially given nobody has ever really enumerated all the (many, many) forms of depression in a meaningful way.

Have met lots of people who are depressed and don't have a troubled past or present. Your descriptions of etiologies, how medications function and help, etc. are simplistic and ignorant at best. My opinion of your opinion is not high, but luckily that's not a good basis for judgment.

I'd agree in so far as it makes pulling scams (or innocently giving useless advice) far too easy:

"I had depression, and I tried X, and it worked. You've got depression, so you should try X." Extremely unlikely to be helpful, and often can be harmful.

Economically, the numbers are on your side (e.g. leading illness for workplace disability)

Applying the (current for any given time) criteria for depression requires a certain amount of training and skill, and the point form list of symptoms that you see as the first section in each diagnosis in the DSM-5 is not standalone. To mention one huge but often-overlooked example, something isn't a mental illness unless it significantly interferes with your life and functioning.

Not to say that people don't incorrectly make diagnoses all the time.

Many of these studies also rely on rating scales (typically HAMD or even PHQ9 for depression) that are a measure of depressive symptoms but don't in themselves have the power to make a diagnosis.

You're probably confusing science as a top-down enterprise rather than a field that works bottom-up (where "bottom" would be grad students). Evidence emerges and builds from below.

Immense kudos for the Douglas Coupland reference.