Devices, Doom-Scrolling, Dopamine: the Weaponization of the Algorithm and You

[worldstarcountry]

This fellow here has come to my attention since earlier this year upon learning the term Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence. I became fascinated because as I was watching and listening, I noticed much of what he was telling me were things I had to learn the hard way by simple trial and error of living in a hostile world where deception and betrayal was more common for me at a young age than it should have been. But he had textbook terms and definitions for so many of the behaviors I learned by experience that it was refreshing to see it was not just me and my observations and the way people call me crazy for pointing out behavioral anomalies. 

NCI stands for Neuro-Cognitive Intelligence – Crafted by Chase Hughes, NCI is the global gold standard of understanding and shaping human behavior. Trusted by elite military teams, CIA operatives, and Fortune 500 Leaders, valuable for anyone who doesn’t settle for average.

Living by his favorite motto, “we rise by lifting others”, Chase freely shares his insights on his collaborative YouTube channel The Behavior Panel, personal YouTube channel, podcast appearances, speaking engagements, and more. He dismantles societal programming, media manipulation, and psychological barriers, empowering individuals to unlock their highest potential.

So in this video, Chase explains the very mechanism behind the algorithm, how it was designed with human psychology in mind as a weapon for your attention span. He breaks down the very structures that manipulate your brain into being unable to put down your device, such as the endless scroll, which the inventor apologized for, because it eliminated the stop mechanism that naturally allows for a pause and then a re-direct of one's focus. He explains how the tech companies characterizes the attention span an asset or commodity to be exploited for profit and weaponized in furtherance of this goal. That the person/s who control your attention span dictate who you trust, who you hate, and what you believe.
He also mentioned an observation I had not taken note of.

People do not dream about their phones. Whenever people talk about their dreams, despite their devices literally occupying entire time blocs of some people's lives, they do not show up in dreams. So that was the title; if you are interested in actually learning and understanding how the technology companies have taken psychology and neuro-science and like the head chopping Meso-American priests of old, tell you what it takes to make the authority happy and bring the sun back out of hiding, then you may enjoy this quick dip into understanding how to reclaim your attention, take a dive. Unfortunately the video is required to be viewed on YouTube's website specifically, and cannot be played back on a third party. I hope that does not turn anyone off from this interesting dive into the mind and algorithms.

Funny, I have been dropping that line for a decade, weaponizing 200 years of psychology, 100 years of neuro-science. Its like this fellow is now explaining what I have been at a loss of words to properly define.

[worldstarcountry]

I was able  to pull the transcript for half of it if it helps.

Most of you that are tuning in right now, you're [music] watching me on a device that I'm about to talk about, and it's these little things uh right here that we all carry around all day long.

It's tiny. [music] It's thin. You're holding it in your hand. It's propped up on something on your desk. It's probably 18 inches from your face. And I want you to notice something before we start. You didn't decide to hold it that way. You don't remember picking it up. It's just there. Your brain's going to say, "Oh, yeah. I already knew that." But I want you to hear this with the full weight of what it truly means. Your attention is worth more per ounce than gold. And I mean that literally.

There are companies out there worth more than the GDP of most countries, and their entire balance sheet is built on one big ass asset. It's the thing that you're pointing at your screen right now. And it's not your eyes, it's your attention. And most of us statistically, we are giving away 96 times a day uh this to a device that was engineered to take it away from you.

That's once every 10 waking minutes. So like total touches or scrolls or whatever for your phone is 2600 per day for the average person. And people who use their phones heavily are over 6,000. When we're talking about scrolling on short form content, you scroll about the height of the Statue of Liberty every day with your thumb. That's the physical labor you're performing for companies for free. And average screen time uh in the US is now between 4 and 5 hours. 4 hours a day is 28 hours a week. That's more than a full day of your life every week. gone into a piece of glass in in a reality that's not even your real life. If you run that across an entire year, you're at 60 days. So this is 2 months of your waking life annually. If you take a 30 year old, if you run that forward to age 80 at this current numbers, the person will like use their phone somewhere between 8 and 10 years years of conscious existence just while they're awake. So, a decade. That's the price. And nobody really remembers agreeing to pay the price. You didn't decide to do this.

A notification on your phone is a script interruption and that's all it is. You're cooking, you're in the kitchen doing something, you're working, talking to your kid, and the buzz on your phone, the vibration, the noise cuts in half uh all the script that was running. And we think like, oh, my focus drifted towards a phone. Your focus was seized. That's a seized level of focus there.

It's the same mechanism that kept your ancestor alive when the stick snaps behind the bush. The phone is cracking a stick about 80 times a day on purpose. Look at what's built into the interface. Blue check marks, all the follower counts, the verified algorithm. The algorithm decides whose face appears in front of you, whose ideas and whose opinions. And if you're honest with yourself, and some of you are, what's happening is your brain is saying, "Who do I watch? Who do I need to imitate? Who do I defer to?" And a recommendation algorithm owns that selection process. You, and I'm willing to go on a limb here and say you didn't choose the voices that have authority in your life. They were most likely served to you. And it's hard to admit it. There's an ego hit to admit something like that. 

So, we have group chats and uh goal streaks and a little your friend is typing right now bubble that comes up on social media. They voice the new belief and either the tribe welcomes them uh or they feel welcomed or they don't. They get rejected. That's the like button. That's the that's the mechanism behind all of this. Your feed's not sorted by truth. And then you think, then you're like, "Oh, yeah. I already knew that." You're like, "Oh, yeah. My feed's sorted by evidence or by interest, right? It's not sorted by interest at all. It's sorted by arousal. It cares that you feel something. You have 10,000 engineers running millions of experiments. They keep what captures attention. They kill everything that doesn't. And evolution did the rest. and Evolution reverse engineered all this stuff uh for the algorithm.

I want to walk you through one pickup of your phone really quick. And I want you to do this with me in your mind step by step. And we'll kind of do this in slow motion because once you see the pipeline, I think you're going to feel it happening. And I want to get you to a place where you feel the pipeline happening. So step one, the phone buzzes. A script interruption. focus is seized, not captured. It's seized. You haven't even looked yet and your focus is seized. And then we get to step two. This is the part uh the dopamine research actually shows and almost everybody gets it backwards. Even YouTube neuroscientists get this backwards. Dopamine doesn't fire when you get a reward. It fires in anticipation of the reward. So the hit happens in this little space, this little gap between the the buzz, the vibrating phone and the looking at the phone. The not knowing is the drug. It could be your kid's school calling you. It could be someone liking your post. It could be some telemarketer, right? Your brain floods in that uncertainty window. And then we get to step three here. Uh, and the scientists have a word for step three.

This is called variable ratio reinforcement. This psychologist BJ Skinner figured this out with pigeons probably 70s something years ago. If you reward every pec, the animal works steadily, non-stop. If you reward randomly, the animal starts pecking frantically and they never ever stop pecking because the rewards are random. So it even after the rewards are are finished and they stop giving out the rewards. It the behavior keeps going.

If you are wondering why I do the colors thing, it is more for me to separate key ideas and statements in a writing. This board just made it much easier. We all operate in different and funny ways.

[IdeomotorPrisoner]

That the person/s who control your attention span dictates who you trust, who you hate, and what you believe.

People curate their own mind control too,  through cookies and site data.  The algorithm is built to maximize your engagement, but that's partly done through the history of personal preference.

It is also designed to make you endlessly scroll to see what your chosen sources say, and move their input to the top. So there is also the great void of original thought that self-perpetuates this mostly for advertising algorithms.

I dont get Trump posts on my feed. But if its had an X or Truth Social account and viewed his spiraling megalomaniac derangement I would get those engaging posts on my feed, and his supporters posts.  Which pulls me in for their easy to digest like-minded commentary confirming by bias. 

And if I click them exvessively it will then give me the A) the posts I prefer to keep me scrolling B) ads for the products my choices say I might want. 

Has Trump fallen victim to the neverending engagement algorithm, *or* invested in it and exploits it to tell people what the think by his posts being first. 

Somewhere in between?

[ArMaP]

What he says is the reason I never liked phones of any kind, and also why I don't like video: nobody dictates how I spend my time.

PS: my phone (I only bought a phone one year ago, to start making programs for Android) doesn't have any social network installed on it, and I don't even use email in it.

[GENERAL EYES]

I rarely use or scroll on my phone, something about it makes my eyes shake uncontrollably for a few seconds.

That said, I often dream about trying to use it, and other devices, and everytime they are riddled with pop ups, redirects, malware and all sorts of flashing chaos....sometimes I can't even type a phone number for an emergency call.

I exprienced one "inception" like dream where the algorhitm got progressively more unhinged and perverse, and it took me several attempts to wake up from that particular dream...I kept "waking up" in the dream and the madness continued, then I'd "wake up" again and the cycle continued about four times before I made it back to the Real World.

Odd.

Generally, as a rule, I prefer offline activites, but my current circumstances do not allow for much offline socialization, so here I am.

[ArMaP]

One funny thing I have noticed about people and their phones is that they accept much more from a phone than from a computer.

If there's a problem with a computer people usually complain loudly and, sometimes, even hit the computer, but if the same problem happens on a phone they just moan about it and try to solve it.

People are strange...

[SteamyAmerican]

Fascinating OP. Thank you.

The analogy of our time, our attention, and the actual amount of scrolling involved is not insignificant. Tying into with what we are shown, vs. what we are allowed to see is also crucial.

In other words, for instance: the U.S. and Israel along with the war in Ukraine, have dominated headlines for years now, yet what we actually see and get to know about these world-changing events is limited to what the media is allowed to offer up. In some cases it’s extremely troubling to see so very little as governments have amended the breadth of what we substance we actually see in the news. Also the lack of investigative journalism has led to the degradation of nuance and critical thinking. Certainly the forming of one’s own opinion as well.