We think that neural activity creates subjective experience (“phenomenal consciousness”) but lack a satisfying, quantitative understanding of how that actually happens. Near the heart of this mystery is the binding problem, which I understand as having two main sub-questions: The human brain is composed of billions of neurons over more than a thousand cubic centimeters, and neural activity…
Like relativity , uncertainty is a deeply beautiful topic that is widely misunderstood. Many people are familiar with the idea that you cannot simultaneously know, for example, a particle’s position and momentum to perfect accuracy. This is often thought of as being due to the fact that you need to interact with a system in order to measure it, and in doing so you alter its state, forcing you to…
With the enormous advances in machine learning over the last few years, it feels like we are now not only on the cusp of big things, but that the world is already a genuinely different place than it was just a little while ago. I mean, how does even just assigning homework work in a world of LLMs? There’s one product I haven’t seen discussed yet that I’m really looking forward to. I call it the…
Consider the following mathematical idea: A function $f(x)$ is smooth and continuous (i.e., it is differentiable everywhere) At some point $x_1$ the slope of $f$ is negative, $f’(x_1) < 0$ At some other point $x_2 > x_1$ the slope is positive, $f’(x_2) > 0$ Therefore by the intermediate value theorem there must be a minimum where $f’(x) = 0$ somewhere between $x_1 < x < x_2$ This strikes us as…
In the paper Psychedelics and the Human Receptorome by Thomas Ray there is a supplementary material table that is one of my favorite datasets of all time. I keep a copy of it on my laptop, with some extra color-coding, and every now and then open it and just think about what this table is trying to tell us. The rows are drugs and the columns are receptor proteins expressed on neurons; the values…
Making a neural interface requires accessing neural activity; the traditional approach involves removing part of the skull and placing electrodes onto or into the brain, something widely done today. 1 However, drilling a hole through the skull and boring through brain tissue to access the required signals is a heavy lift for most applications. It really requires a lot of reward for the level of…
Long story short, a couple friends and I — our unifying trait being persistent optimism that with the best possible tools and minimal red tape, more things are possible than most people realize — have started a new company, which we've named Science . I explain a bit about what we're up to below, and if these kinds of challenges are interesting to you, please consider coming to work with us! It’s…
There is at present a tough battle being fought between technologist defenders of encryption on the one side and just about everyone else on the other. This conflict, sometimes dubbed the Crypto Wars , has a long history and it’s clear that pressure has been building on Apple specifically for some time now, especially after they refused to help access the 2015 San Bernardino shooter’s phone and…
When I started taking the idea of AGI seriously , I noticed a shift in how I thought about the world: rather than seeing people or institutions, I just saw agents . Napoleon, Washington and Alexander, for example, are some of the great agents of history. The fact that they were of type Homo sapiens isn’t why we remember them, but because they were extremely effective solutions to the dynamical…
The principle of absolute freedom of speech has embedded in it a basic premise that words do not inherently mean anything. This wasn’t obvious to me and felt surprising, in the this-must-be-wrong way, when I noticed it. But if we agree that there exist things so bad that they should be prohibited, like murder, and simultaneously take that there is no sequence of words that are so inherently bad…
Consider the following interpretation of Twitter: Twitter is a process that is applied to a human thought vector $x$, a time $t$, and a state vector $c_{t-1}$ which emits a value $tweet$ and a new state vector $c_{t}$. Twitter is effectively a method of sampling text from humans at various times and storing the outputs. The sampled text also has some extra structure: hash tags, @references, a…
Though I believe in capitalism, I am not particularly individualistic: I’ve always believed that it would be far more fun to be successful alongside a group of friends rather than being the sole owner of something huge. Community is super important, and if you take this out further, a healthy society is a far richer substrate for creative expression than a sick one. It is hard to read stories…
Back in the 1980s, we imagined that the future would be big arrays of screens enmeshed with dense bundles of wires; that technology would take over the world. In reality, as technology has taken over the world it has become increasingly invisible. The beautiful aspiration is not to be surrounded by machines, but for technology to disappear into nature. Looking at a laptop, physically it is…
Relativity is one of my favorite topics in physics. Its origins were almost pure logic puzzle science , which in my opinion is one of the most fun and satisfying types of science. Most people have a vague sense of what relativity is – the speed of light is finite, and something about time travel? – but they don’t really know what it is, which is too bad because the principles are very simple, and…
A while ago, the camera on my phone started acting up: opening it would show an image for a couple seconds but then go black. Simultaneously, when I turned my wireless headphones on there would be a couple seconds of sidetone (hearing through your own microphone) before it cut to the expected silence. I promptly got a new phone and the old one was sent to forensics. A little while after that, my…
If you could look like anything – no really, anything – what would you choose? I’m not talking about aesthetics, but what sensory faculties and motor capabilities you’d have. Like: would you have legs? Would you be lighter than air? Use powered flight to get around? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that the sensory faculty I’d most want to alter is my…
The track The Four Agreements by Matthew Dekay on Anjunadeep 11 – which, by the way, is absolutely fantastic, definitely one of the best albums of 2020, Jody Wisternoff and James Grant are clearly geniuses – has a fascinating dialogue track from Miguel Ruiz: What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You’re dreaming with the brain…
Over the last few years I have gone from an AGI skeptic to being significantly worried about just how soon it will likely come to exist and how dramatically it will reshape the world. Like climate change, it is a challenging problem in part due to a widespread reluctance to even recognize it as a tangible issue, and then when it is it’s unclear what can or should be done. I want to start by…
One of the classic questions of consciousness is whether any two people experience a particular fundamental percept, like the color red , the same way. How can we possibly know whether my red is the same as your red and isn’t instead, say, your green? The answer is we can’t, really, but I don’t want to get too stuck on this because it’s not what this post is actually about; it’s just a jumping off…
I have an unusually large amount of information about my health. I order my own quarterly bloodwork through WellnessFX; I have an annual elective MRI and cardiac ultrasound (first through Health Nucleus, now RadiologyAssist); I have an elective Dexcom G6 CGM; I regularly use a home blood pressure cuff and my Kardia 6L; and more. I am careful to avoid being a burden on the system — all of this is…
Over the last year or so I have become increasingly active as an investor. It is a small percent of my time and energy — 99% of my attention is devoted to Neuralink — but the future is coming quickly now and there are many interlocking elements that are important to support, and so I am interested in doing that in whatever little ways I can. When I write posts that appear here my intended audience…
More detailed technical article: "Constraints on an external reality under the simulation hypothesis", pdf One of my long-running interests is thinking about how to build a virtual world to go with our future neural interfaces. It’s not just a software engineering challenge: there are real physics problems hidden in it. Separately, some of my friends are enamored with the simulation hypothesis —…
1% of women at age 40 who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer? There’s a long history of studies that ask…
One of my close friends is a doctor at a well known academic medical center. A long time ago, he told me that they’ll handle the actually sick patients quickly, but they put the not-sick patients in “the tent,” where wait times might be quite long. I asked him what “actually sick” meant and he said, “likely to die in the next two hours.” My experience has been that most doctors quickly categorize…
More detailed technical article: "Physics considerations for a simulated reality", pdf Though graphics have improved by leaps and bounds, modern game engines still feel very far from enabling an open-ended simulated reality in the sense of the The Matrix . Specifically, what I think they are lacking is a materials system, part of a larger missing physics engine. If my only possible interactions…
One of the things I did early on in Transcriptic’s history was invite successful operators by for lunch to speak to us. One question I’d always ask if no one else brought it up was “what should the balance be between firefighting versus building for the future?” That tension had driven my team crazy basically since the beginning of the company. Without exception the answer was “oh you firefight…
One of the great frustrations of my life is that everything takes longer than one would hope. Preferably things would be instant: have that great idea for a product or technology and poof it appears. Instead not only do you need execution capability to back up the idea, but you also need a lot of time. Even with a great team, perfectly capable of executing, you might not have enough time. We talk…
One of the things I find myself thinking a lot when looking at investing — whether resources to a project at Transcriptic, helping with diligence on other companies, or just my time in some idea — is “that sounds great and totally reasonable, but is it true?” The trueness of good sounding explanations in the absence of fundamental math is both surprisingly underrated and hard to determine. For…
One observation I’ve had is that great value is rarely created through secrecy. On the contrary, most of the biggest successes at hard problems have no problem talking about what they’re doing even years ahead of time . They may not do much PR or marketing, because that’s a distraction and not related to their current white-hot risk, but they’re happy to share the results and basic math that says…
I grew up reading William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Today, knowledge of TrueCrypt and PGP is a key part of being an investigative journalist and dozens of cryptocurrencies have serious real-world value. I’ve worked on actual brain-machine interfaces. Multiple companies have launched and landed rockets with varying levels of total energy. A major presidential candidate was formerly a reality TV…
One of the many interesting questions neural engineering raises is, “where is the border?” We think of there being a common sense line between me and you and being different people, but this starts to get fuzzier when you bring high bandwidth, low latency brain-machine interfaces into the mix. If there’s a one bit-per-second direct connection between a neuron in your brain and a neuron in my brain…
Every entrepreneur understands the importance of persistence. When you start a company the first thing that happens is you get to listen to a whole slew of people tell you how unlikely your idea is to succeed and that they can think of all of these problems with it. If you’re lucky you only have to listen to this in concentrated form for six months though it’s often longer, and of course it never…
It’s easy to be very busy running a company. Being overscheduled is an ideal of Silicon Valley and can be very satisfying when you’re having a big impact. But there’s a big difference between being busy and being productive, and the reality is that most of what many people spend lots of time frantically doing would be done better by trusting someone else. I’m always asking what I can be doing to…
Someone recently sent me The Virtues of Virtual — And Why We’re Devirtualizing and wanted to get my take on it, given that I’m clearly in the virtualization-is-the-future camp. The upshot is that Padlock Therapeutics , until recently an entirely virtual organization built on CROs, is now bringing some of the work in-house on the argument that CROs just shuffle money and people around without…
This used to be an unlisted post that I referred to people who emailed me asking for advice. I think it holds up relatively well with several years of hindsight, so I've added it to the main index of articles. Hey, you’ve asked for startup advice! Read this first and if at the end you have more specific questions, I’ll try to answer them. The first thing to know is that I’m really bad at…
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of company we want to build with Transcriptic. Extreme focus. Everyone is tasked with exactly one priority. Radical transparency on metrics. Every employee should be able to figure out the company’s exact revenue and burn rates in less than five minutes. Big impact in small teams. Adding people usually creates more problems than it solves. Refusal…
One of my oldest personal rules is avoid little leagues. Little leagues are places where you’ll develop more slowly, to an asymptote that’s lower than it might be elsewhere. The undergraduate investment club is a little league for being a professional analyst. TEDx is a little league for TED. Little leagues are relative: being an intern at a technology company at thirteen or taking non-AP Calculus…
Make it as easy as possible for your code to be correct. Create frequent, limited scope commits with full code review. Have flawless whitespace control and totally consistent syntax. Always return a strongly typed, affirmative result. Avoid exceptions. Avoid mutable state whenever possible. Explicit is better than implicit. Make it difficult to express something invalid. Avoid ad-hoc arrangements;…
In the most general terms, there is no such thing as computer security . It’s much easier to destroy security than it is to create it. Most of this article discusses specific techniques and technologies for securing data in the face of different classes of adversaries. This article is geared at “relative” laymen: people who are computer savvy, okay programmers, but not experts; for more…
I never really understood why banks encouraged a separation between checking and savings accounts. I still don’t, but at least I now have a theory. It turns out that the American banking system is intrinsically insecure. It might be that foreign banking systems are the same way, but I’m not 100% sure how they work so I’ll limit this post to the US. The problem is simple: if you have an account…
I’ve been excited about Bitcoin for a while, and I’ve been starting to see many of my friends get interested in it, too. Bitcoin is a very intriguing concept – a store of value that’s native to the internet! – but it’s also a very young and complex one. There are already a lot of good explanations of how Bitcoin works at a high level. There aren’t, however, as many good posts explaining the…
I was recently asked for five points based on my experience starting a company that “every entrepreneur should know.” These are the five I came up with: Don’t raise too much too early. Too much professional money into a startup that’s not ready for it will kill the company. If you’re having a hard time fundraising, think hard about the negative feedback. Investors are on your side – they want to…
I fly a lot. As in, I spend twenty hours a week on planes and made Diamond status on Delta in three months. Friends often ask me if there are any frequently flyer tricks they should know about, and the answer is “of course!”. I hear a lot about how much flying sucks (my favorite email so far: “Travel blows. Death seems easy by comparison. Never go anywhere.”), and there are definitely ways to make…
There’s currently a widespread belief in society that the trouble with brain-machine interfacing is understanding the ‘neuronal code’: what the brain is saying and how it encodes information about its world. There are over one hundred billion neurons in a human brain talking amongst themselves in a hidden language our best neuroscientists are only beginning to understand. This is partly true. Yes,…