RAB1138

"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

This is stunning.

The relationship between the Default Mode Network and a rich inner life seems like a reasonable enough connection, as does the relationship between DMN activity and loneliness.

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.

Can you provide more details about how you're running them model in-browser?

team@usedopamine.com ;)

Bruh. Did you even look at the price on Space?

What on the evil part? Or that we make the whole team read Skinner? It's a thin book.

Thanks! We think so too! Also, you have a close sarcasm tag with no open sarcasm tag. Dude that's bad form.

But I'll give you the TL;DR:

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

(right, it was more an invitation for discourse!)

Hi!

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.

Paul (author on that piece) is wonderful!

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...

Yes. See attached.

https://youtu.be/Qsi08xvhaQ4?t=4m21s

I tried to emoji fistbump you here, but HN won't let me.

WE HAVE A FAX!!??!?!

We love that one! Required reading.

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 ;)

The men and women who write your software control the boundary conditions for your experiences there. They control what and how you can think, feel, and believe in that experience. When Twitter doubles the numbers of characters you can tweet, they're making a decision about the quality and size of thoughts people can express - and in turn what depth of dialogue we have there.

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.

Contrarian, not evil, is more of the motto. You don't get anyone to listen if you just talk about an AI SaaS platform for long-term habit formation. It comes off as wonkish. Trust me, we tried ;)

Happy to answer any questions you have! It's all of our job to be transparent about the new tablestakes of design, because that transparency builds exact dialogues like this! It would be more audacious if we didn't publicize what we're doing and these techniques remained the dark patterns that keep people hooked to social apps that have poor alignment to what people actually want out of life!

Hi!

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

Space works by giving you a set of new app icons to use instead of the normal ones. The process of creating new app icons from a webpage is very streamlined in Safari. As it turns out, most iPhone users who aren't the HN crowd use Safari as their default browser. We're working on Android native, Chrome support, and chrome extensions!

Thanks! We're working on the chrome extension too.

hey @gingerlime, I'm Ramsay, Founder @ Dopamine Thanks for the feedback!

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?

I don't think we should have expected the temporary news of decreased hours to account for greater happiness, but rather that people filled their newly free time with pursuits that made them happy.

Relevant: Eroom's law: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....

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.

This feels like such a cop-out philosophy: just get used to it and don't bring it up in polite company. This reeks of cognitive dissonance.

Calm your divs.

But leave one div crazy. That yo party div.

OK so I'm not the only person deeply troubled by their generous offer to remotely test my servers for vulnerability. Thank god they included the safe 'at-home' test kit

I'm not sure the analogy holds. Yes, the tower level of control can be used to remotely disconnect thousands of people from the net, but this just separates people from the network.

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.

Relevant: Neil Stephenson's Reamde takes the principle of Ransomware and plays it out to a fun conclusion. This site would have come in handy. Highly recommended http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Reamde-Audiobook/B0...