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robertothais

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  Location: New York & Berlin
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Go, ES6, React, Redux, Node, Octave/Matlab, Docker
  Github: https://github.com/robertothais
  Resume: https://keybase.pub/robertothais/resume.pdf
  Email: roberto [at] astor.place
I'm a web application engineer with 8 years of experience building software for startups. Previously head of engineering at a YC and venture-backed company and CTO of another, which got acquired.

Undergraduate at Yale (Philosophy) and graduate work at NYU (Math). Currently interested and learning crypto.

Looking for part-time, consulting work. Preferably remote, but can meet in New York/Berlin depending on availability.

If consciousness is a physical thing, how can you be so convinced that it is impossible to talk about it in physical terms? Couldn't the difficulty be due to a deficiency in our current explanatory power, as opposed to something more fundamental? What evidence do you have to support that biological talk (about consciousness, or otherwise) is necessarily irreducible to physical talk?

These questions are very interesting and very hard, and dismissing honest attempts to grapple with them rigorously, wrong as they may turn out to be, seems rash to me.

I like to think of networking as being loosely analogous to an optimization process like gradient descent [1]. You start with an initial "guess" of what your optimal network could potentially be. In practice, this will be the people you already know through school, work or through friendships. From there, you follow an iterative process that improves that guess through successive iterations, consistently applying strategies like those described in the article.

It's hard to say when this process would "converge", but looking for an answer to that may be straining the analogy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent

The "make sure people hear about it" part is non-trivial, and assumes that you already have a minimal audience that cares about your work.

In other words, you're already networking when you're trying to get people to pay attention to you. The article provides a set of practical lessons intended to help you with that.