"You’ve got a hundred-million-dollar mission — why are you using software built in the ’90s to design and launch it?" - that got me. This is awesome
74 karma · joined April 23, 2014
What would be fascinating to me is an exploration of causality.
Can feelings of loneliness be increased by an upregulation (dTCS) of Default Mode Network activity? Can they be reduced by a downregulation? Can either of those be performed without substantially changing the subjects conscious qualia or internal states?
This will be really interesting to watch in a few years.
Lightening rod: because now we're on HN.
Humanitarian use: see below about 100 years ago vs. today.
Quality of people: that's why Space is free.
What's design's ethical imperative: also, see below about 100 years ago vs. today.
Founders of push notification companies: Ask the CEOs of Leanplum/Marketo/Intercom/Vizurly/Kahuna why they haven't released an antidote for push notifications? Please. Try to get them to talk about it.
Tristan: great friend, mutual supporters
Pricing model: $0.05/MAU for qualifying startups.
xo
Because we don't sell to apps that would hurt people. See manifesto on usedopamine.com/team/index.html.
~100 years ago, the most frequent causes of death in the US were pathogens for which we barely had a name. Pnemonia, Flu, Cholera, Fevers. And it was only after we developed a rigorous technology of the body (modern medicine) did we lift millions of people out of suffering simultaneously.
Today, if you are under 50, you're mostly like going to die of opiates. Over 50? Type-2 diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease, obesity and its complications, and stress-related illness.
Every single one of these has strong behavioral components.
Building a smartphone-first, AI-powered rigorous technology of the human mind gives us all an above-the-table, democratized chance at designing scalable technologies that stop this. It spreads better across national, sex, gender, and SES lines than most other behavior-change oriented solutions. And as we enter an age of an excess of cheap energy, food, and data, we NEED a rigorous way to help us better align modern aspirations with an ancient brainstem.
Not so much remorseless, we were just shooting for contrarian and attention grabbing...And here we are....knee deep in front page of HN hate mail...
His work on why you, me, everyone on this thread, and every species that's part of the subphylum Vertebrata shaped the course of thinking from contemporary Machine Learning techniques like Q-Learning to us!
Not evil, have done our reading though ;)
Analogously, when someone designs a diet app, they're creating the boundary conditions of a new behavior pattern for users. Their use of Dopamine aligns well with their end user's goals: in the same way that you hold friends close because you know they rub off on you, so too should we think about our software. Having an app on your phone you chose to let close to your mind and behavior - to be a new venue of your thought and future self - is a decision about who you want to become. And if that app can use good design, a good interface, and persuasive tech to help you achieve your health or diet goals: you win.
That's an alignment of what tech wants and what humans want.
Founder (Brown) here. Appreciate the traffic!
Also, would love to clear up mob misconceptions about:
-Why did we pick lightening-rod branding?
-Why was this the most humanitarian use of a neuroscience MS/PhD?
-What quality of people must we be to do this?
-What is design's ethical imperative that, 100 years ago when most died of infections diseases, that this year the majority of people over 50 will die of strongly behavioral-based diseases? [1]
-How come the Founders of the Push Notification teams aren't part of the cultural dialogue?
-What does Tristan Harris think?!
-What is our pricing model and can your startup get a discount? (YES!)
[1] soundcloud.com/digital-mindfulness/89-the-science-of-addictive-technology-with-ramsay-brown/s-YQzyZ
1.) We're releasing our web sdks next week: A PHP version and a Python version, each with a JS frontend wrapper. If you email me at ramsay@usedopamine.com I can poke you when it's shipped!
2.) We do! To get dev's off the ground we released a library of popups with different icon images like you saw. You can modify parameters like color, duration, copy.
AND you can arbitrarily call any UX-updating function from the code that handles the Dopamine API's response. This lets you map a response we give you to any function in your app. We're sprinting to deploy a way to do this more elegantly on the integration dashboard also.
3.) Yes, we did. TL;DR: We outperform alternatives that devs are resorting to right now. @tdaltonc: care to chime in?
So what do we do here? We're not just underfunding basic biology research, it's rolling down hill and affecting the efficacy of our products oriented pharma R&D investments.
Best proposal I've heard to pull out of this trend? Computational biology: simulate different tissue types and organ systems (their dynamics, metabolic pathways, flow of matter/energy/information) and expose the simulated tissues to potential drugs in high-throughput simulations. Test exponentially more compounds and prune obvious failure from the chemical structure tree early and often. What you're left with is a restricted set of compounds to try synthesizing and taking to trial.
But leave one div crazy. That yo party div.
The remote kill switch disconnects people from their ability to document what's happening. This frees the state from a sousveillent presence because it robs people of the ability to record what's happening at all. Remotely shutting down devices isn't about preventing people from tweeting - it's about preventing people from being able to create durable records of what happens.