Also, too, your kernel of an idea isn't that special. Probably half the people on LessWrong could have thought of it, if they gave 5 minutes of thought to whatever domain its in.

Totally agree. But remember - the vaccine app isn't my real idea. It's the idea I came up with to use as an example after 5 minutes of thought :)

I really appreciate all your comments and taking the time to engage with this. They're helping me think about the actual idea I have in mind much more clearly and in more detail. Thank you!

All great points. I've read the article you mentioned, and it will be a crucial guiding principle in how I would want to design this - maybe the most crucial.

That seems to me like a reasonable response to the incentives they currently face.

Thanks for following up last week's discussion about the first paper. It's pretty sad that it falls on internet sleuths to debunk claims that should be obviously questionable after thinking for two seconds about the underlying scientific principles, but so it goes. This study should have been flagged immediately by a competent peer review process.

On a personal level though, I'm thankful I've been able to improve at noticing such claims myself, thanks in large part to things I've learned here.

Thanks for the recommendation - very glad he is doing this. My favorite part was this paraphrased dialog with a pharmacy:

Us: How would someone make an appointment with you? 

Pharmacy: Go to the county website at... 

Us: You know you're not on that, right? 

Pharmacy: WHAT.

Inadequate equilibria at their finest. I wish him all the best in his efforts to make them more adequate.

Thanks for the very useful feedback. To answer your questions:

1. For the vaccine example, I agree that would be a huge problem and probably make it totally unworkable. Your hint is right on. For my real example, the "rules" wouldn't change much at all, or only very slowly (on the timescale of months or more likely years).
2. The customer is any individual with disposable income. There is not a way to use Google or Excel to solve this problem. As for how many there are, it's either something that would never take off and fizzle out and die, or it could become a service that millions of people find invaluable. Hard to predict in more detail than that.

Thanks so much for the quick and detailed reply! I agree I haven't provided enough info yet to let you (or anyone) answer the question well. This is mostly because I came up with my real idea very recently, and I'm a total rookie in this field so almost everything is an "unknown unknown" to me at this point. Also, for now I want to avoid giving too many details, until I've worked out the idea more fully.

But to address some of your points and provide some additional info that may be helpful:

• It's great to know that edge cases and polish result in a substantial cost inflation. This is something I wouldn't have predicted. Providing a simple and intuitive user experience would be crucial to this idea, and I would be willing to spend extra time and resources to make the user experience as seamless as possible. In my (admittedly naive) mind, I'm imagining making a fairly optimized and well designed user interface, letting test users play with it and give feedback, then ultimately releasing a very professional and intuitive final version to the public. As you mentioned, I'm sure I would need a lot of help with graphic design and product design, since I've never done this. (Side note: is UX user experience?)
• I'm not in a rush to get this to market quickly - as I said I think it's more important to prioritize quality over a quick rollout.
• I also plan to give users very limited options for how to interact with the app. Simplicity and making it obvious how to do what they want to do is key.
• Regarding payments, I would need to be able to accept payments from individual users, and make payments either to other users or to companies. The idea is to provide a service where individual users would sign up for an automatic monthly subscription by whatever method is easiest for them (credit card, Paypal, etc.)

Hope this helps and I'd be happy to hear any further suggestions!

As an introvert who tends to keep different parts of my life separate (work vs different friend groups vs hobbies, etc) out of fear of social disapproval or "using up too many weirdness points", this statement strongly resonated with me. It feels like something I have already been trying to do slowly in my own way, but you outlined a very clear way of thinking about it. I gave this comment a strong upvote.

When you write one, I would be excited to read it!

My best hypothesis at the moment is that there was substantial overlap between the people who were still betting on Trump post-election and the people who were actively looking for opportunities to disrupt the remainder of the electoral process like we saw on Jan. 6, or who assigned a higher probability to such disruptions succeeding. Such people may have felt they had "insider knowledge" that was worth betting on, and to some extent, they may have been better calibrated than the conventional wisdom.

I didn't look at the study itself, but how do they know the initial infections were "real" infections? Is it possible they are effectively just finding the false positive rate from the initial infection testing?