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vansul's comments

vansul | 5 years ago | on: Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)

Most important realisation for me personally: keep emailing.

As an introverted dev trying to sell I often assume silence means they don't care and they hate me. I've learnt this is almost always wrong - the recipient is typically just busy or indecisive. Stay polite/respectful/human but keep at them and don't let the void kill you.

Still figuring out the details but getting over that was quite a profound feeling and has turned out pretty useful in life generally

vansul | 5 years ago | on: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Great interview! Rebecca Goldstein never fails to kindle my interests in philosophy. Science really needs people like her, she pulls the rug out from under us but does it from a place of love. Her ability to communicate makes a huge difference also.

vansul | 5 years ago | on: Notes for courses taken at Harvard (2015-2019)

This[0] was posted up on here a while ago - has some good book recommendations for teaching yourself maths (assuming you remember some basics from school[1]).

I got a few of them and whilst they may have gathered some dust... They seem great! Also obliged to recommend Khan Academy and the 3Blue1Brown youtube channel - but they are probably best for fun/inspiration

[0] 'Mathematics for the adventurous self-learner' -https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner

[1] If I knew zero maths I'd probably check out the basics on Khan Academy or maybe get a tutor

vansul | 5 years ago | on: Is the World Getting Safer?

The Doomsday clock idea has a lot of respectable people behind it but I've always been unclear how it isn't just a bias-o-meter.

Kahneman and others have done a lot of persuasive work examining how experts are often quite bad at judgement/prediction. How can we be sure the Doomsday Clock actually means anything substantive (as compared to data)?

vansul | 5 years ago | on: Why books don't work (2019)

Jonathan Blow recently streamed a talk called 'Video Games and the Future of Education'[0] that makes similar arguments.

He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into 'learning by doing'. He's sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into 'gamification' as a concept.

The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to.

Books are great.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFScmtiC44

vansul | 5 years ago | on: I was excited for Neuralink, then I watched the demo

To me (neuro undergrad, comp sci masters), the demo seemed underwhelming but encouraging. As far as I can tell the tech was not doing anything particularly novel and the 'fitbit in your skull' analogy was personally uninspiring. [edit: the volume of reads /form factor is a step forward]

That said, the demo was mostly for attracting talent - lots of money and a great team will likely get them somewhere. In terms of their long term goals I expect the area that will give them the most trouble is reading/writing interesting stuff on the cortex. Neural coding is really hard and poorly understood.

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