Max Hodak's Writings

We think that neural activity creates subjective experience (“phenomenal consciousness”) but lack a satisfying, quantitative understanding of how that actually happens.

Like relativity, uncertainty is a deeply beautiful topic that is widely misunderstood.

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.

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) >…

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.

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 t…

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.

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.

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.

The principle of absolute freedom of speech has embedded in it a basic premise that words do not inherently mean anything.

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 $c_{t}$.

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.

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.

Relativity is one of my favorite topics in physics.

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.

If you could look like anything – no really, anything – what would you choose?

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 Ru…

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.

One of the classic questions of consciousness is whether any two people experience a particular fundamental percept, like the color red, the same way.

I have an unusually large amount of information about my health.

Over the last year or so I have become increasingly active as an investor.

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.

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.

One of my close friends is a doctor at a well known academic medical center.

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.

One of the things I did early on in Transcriptic’s history was invite successful operators by for lunch to speak to us.

One of the great frustrations of my life is that everything takes longer than one would hope.

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 tr…

One observation I’ve had is that great value is rarely created through secrecy.

I grew up reading William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

One of the many interesting questions neural engineering raises is, “where is the border?”

Every entrepreneur understands the importance of persistence.

It’s easy to be very busy running a company.

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.

This used to be an unlisted post that I referred to people who emailed me asking for advice.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of company we want to build with Transcriptic.

One of my oldest personal rules is avoid little leagues.

Make it as easy as possible for your code to be correct.

In the most general terms, there is no such thing as computer security.

I never really understood why banks encouraged a separation between checking and savings accounts.

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.

I was recently asked for five points based on my experience starting a company that “every entrepreneur should know.”

I fly a lot.

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.