June 2020

I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in […]

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We submitted our rebuttal to Brain and received a prompt reply from the Editor-In-Chief, Dr. Kullman himself, offering us an opportunity to revise – with the main criticism that our letter contained unfounded insinuations and allegations. We tried to interpret his message as best we could and respond accordingly. To most readers it was pretty clear what he wrote and the message he intended to convey. Nevertheless, in our revision, we stayed much closer to the words of […]

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Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks.  Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dramatically improving clinical trials, which are usually time-consuming and cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, is one of the highest-leverage ways to get out of it faster.   […]

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[Updated on 2020-06-17: Add “exploration via disagreement” in the “Forward Dynamics” section. Exploitation versus exploration is a critical topic in Reinforcement Learning. We’d like the RL agent to find the best solution as fast as possible. However, in the meantime, committing to solutions too quickly without enough exploration sounds pretty bad, as it could lead to local minima or total failure. Modern RL algorithms that optimize for the best returns can achieve good exploitation quite efficiently, while exploration […]

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