chrisrxth

Location: New York City

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript/ES6, Node, Python, Pandas/Numpy/Matplotlib, D3, React, Angular

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisrxth

GitHub: https://github.com/cjroth

Email: [email protected]

I am currently on the trip in Jeju. Hacker Paradise is great. Highly recommend.

Exciting! Curious what the future of nootropics will be.

This is the idea - we'll have to address the safety and ethical concerns of each substance individually.

Thanks for the thoughts. We've spoken with a lawyer who specializes in FDA issues. We will have informed consent waivers for participants.

Rob does have formal training in scientific ethical issues and is more than competent on the subject.

Also, L-Theanine is something that you can purchase at the grocery store as a food supplement and it has an excellent safety record and no known toxic dosage.

If it makes you feel better, we are a supplement distributor that happens to help you record whether or not the supplements actually work.

Could you elaborate?

We make no medical claims about our product either - we only reference existing science.

We're going to keep adding more trials - but there's no timeframe for when you have to start and end the trial. You can order it and start it whenever you receive it in the mail.

Not yet :( Like Steer said, you can still order Theanine independently of our company but I can let you know when we are ready for international orders if you send me your email!

Interesting. I've never heard of someone reacting to L-Theanine this way. Perhaps it could be an allergy?

Indeed it's difficult to tell - exactly the reason why a double-blinded trial on yourself can help you determine if it's making a significant difference or not :)

We chose L-Theanine because it has an excellent safety record, is well studied, and has no known toxic dose. We are very aware of safety and ethics. There are many nootropics and supplement companies safely distributing the same L-Theanine.

While we work through our protocol we will continue to dive into ethics and safety.

You bring up a good point! We will be adding some outlines about ethics soon. Thanks for reminding us of the importance!

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I totally agree about educating people on good practices. This is a big part of what I want to do over the next few years - I think educating people on the scientific method, especially in regards to self experimentation is important. We want to work to create best practices and protocols in the self-experimentation/quantified self world. We are planning on putting together some content (videos and such) on the topic and incorporating that educational aspect in our platform.

As far as the supplements go, I agree with that as well. We're planning on adding more once the L-Theanine trial is sorted out. This is just our practice round to get the protocol right. What other supplements would you be curious to see?

This won't be an issue because we are supplying the supplements which are going to come from an established and reputable supplier. This is not a platform where anyone can sell their own supplements.

We picked L-Theanine because of its safety profile and mild psychactive properties, meaning you can tell if you've taking it or not but it's not an overbearing feeling. We wanted the first experiment to be fairly predictable while we work through all the kinks of launching this.

Yeah, that would be nice. There is such thing as a Certificate of Analysis which we are going to try to get from our supplier. http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/united-kingdom/technical-service...

Are you mainly referring to it being a CYP3A4 inhibitor?

Just read through that. I agree with the points about self-reporting being unreliable.

Even with the bias of self reporting, differences between real and placebo will still be meaningful. You can't entirely deceive yourself if you don't know what you just took.

Also, there is some degree of honesty required for this experiment. If someone really wanted to, they could open up the pills and taste them to see if it's placebo or not. They could also intentionally lie. But the goal here is to learn about yourself through experimentation, so I expect most people that participate to have some level of desire for truth and honesty. I would also argue that while these biases do exist, even large randomized clinical trials have the same pitfalls, so we are not necessarily worse off than what's already out there.

This is definitely one potential path we are considering. There's a question of whether we want to keep this specific to supplements/pills or try to broaden it to other things like exercise or diet (which are not exactly double-blindable)

There are some in existence already:

- quantifiedmind.com for self-testing your mind, which has a few group experiments as well. I'm looking into integrating with them as part of doubleblinded.com.

- PACO (by Google) https://www.pacoapp.com/ Pretty cool and flexible platform, although not the most user friendly or easy to figure out. It is open source and has an app, which is cool.

- A few sites like 23andme and ubiome have a lengthy list of survey questions they ask you, which I only imagine they would pass through pattern recognition algorthms to detect correlations between whatever information you give them and your Genome (or gut genome in the case of 23andme).

So yeah, there is stuff out there. We want to do this for nootropics and supplements (and eventually much more).

That's a valid concern, and I agree that it's alarming. We will disclose where we are obtaining the L-Theanine from and provide a Certificate of Analysis.

Also, since this is a double blinded trial, if there are significant differences between placebo and real powders then that affirms that the powder was real.

Good call. consumerlab.com is good too.

Hey, yes I run it. Just set it up a few days ago. I'd love any help you want to offer as far as getting the word out and getting it started - this is the hardest part.

Also if you are interested, I'm working on a few more related projects that I'd love to chat about and am looking for collaborators on. Wanna shoot me an email? [email protected]

This is awesome - I feel like this is the future of IaaS user experiences.