61–70 of 145 posts
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 strong…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
That's great but what is really needed is litigation/legislation.
Before I even got through the first paragraph I was reminded of B.F. Skinner and his book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity', which I read in high school. So it's pretty funny that they named their AI after him. Dopamine labs may be evil, but at least they're self aware.
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 ;)
I think I truly get what you are doing, but I definitely think you are going to have to very seriously explain to people here WHAT the problem is and how you are going to help.
So some straight up advice -
1) People here need to understand with examples from your research, on just how Bad the effect of un-noticed conditioning can be.
2) Highlight your mission statement, and very strongly defend the part where your tools do good. Preferably with illustrations.
If you want to take on anti-hero, branding, remember that it only works if people are intimately familiar with the inner workings of his mind and thus his motivations.
As such you may want to put this very prominently out there -
>We watched and read too much scifi growing up. And for every 1 dystopia movie, there's 3 better utopia novels. So now we can't get 2 determinately optimistic ideas out of our head: (1) the future is going to be awesome (and awesome for everyone: not just white bearded educated heteronormative californian male technocrats: that would suck). (2) The relationship between humans and our machines must be one of mutual thriving and improvement. The little magical slabs of glass that live in our pockets and proliferate across the globe are tools for human thriving. So we built Dopamine to help that future became manifest.
>Technology is becoming more (addictive / persuasive / coercive) every day and there isn't much we can do to reverse it. And it sucks that the technologies that are becoming persuasive the fastest aren't necessarily ones that are great for human thriving. You deserve a better world than one in which the most persuasive technologies demand from you your eyeball hours and brand loyalty in exchange for cat videos. That's dystopic.
people will also want to know that its not marketing speak. SO you will need to show that you take pains to actually move us to the world we need to go to.
>Dopamine’s founders argue that they reserve the right to deny service to specific companies whose work seems to be off the level... Just "trust" us. There are obviously many teams working on doing this, but never so audacious. These things are definitely not a value add to society, yet very profitable, like e.g. heroin if that doesn't sound too hyperbolic.
A casino is usually more profitable than a hospital too. It's probably the central problem of capitalism. Monetary systems draw no distinction between wealth creation and wealth extraction, and the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that the latter will always be much easier. When you design chips, cure diseases, or build rockets you are fighting entropy. When you addict, misinform, and con people entropy is on…
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 strong…
Are you hiring?
I am just waiting for a lawyer for someone with Internet Addiction ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480687/ ) to sue this company over one of their supported apps. This is the kind of thing that I fear will prompt a backlash from the people and government and destroy the entire online ads regime that underpins the current Internet.
There is, of course, an argument that any manipulation of human behaviour is inherently evil, but it's a very weak one - if you manipulate a person to eat well, exercise, donate to charity, call their parents and vote for a [insert a political cause that you believe to be inherently moral], is it still an evil thing to do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's great but what is really needed is litigation/legislation.
Why? On what basis?
It is inherently a people problem.
The issue is simply that any fix (by code or by competition), will only move the conflict point from its current location to a new place on the board.
Without being able to approach the bad actors and their motivations/incentives directly, you will not be able to effect change.
And there is always going to be an incentive to manipulate minds, easily and at scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense, but I do not believe you. I can't, on something like this. Talk is cheap.
What on the evil part? Or that we make the whole team read Skinner? It's a thin book.
Welp, there's another one on the 'never touch with a 10-foot pole' pile. Yikes, your promotional account sounds like a grinning glassy-eyed sociopath. Serious goosebumps.