~~Regina George~~ Neel Nanda started a blog, so I started a blog. Actually, I’ve been sitting on this for about a year, threatening to myself to do it every 2 weeks or so, which might be a little bit more embarrassing.

I just graduated from my master’s degree, which was a difficult process for me for a number of reasons that I might write about later. One lesson that it taught me, that I’ll forever be thankful for, is that nothing could be better for your brain than putting your thoughts into some real-life format. To-dos need to be written down to get done. Research ideas need to be torn apart by your professor to become viable. Dissatisfaction with your life, or even just natural latent energy, needs to be turned into a sport or writing or relationships or lasting change, or it’ll become rumination and worse. I get that this is obvious to the general population – it was not obvious to me.

So I’m going to start writing about research topics that I think are cool. I have no idea if they’ll be worthwhile or readable for a long time, but I’m going to keep posting and posting until I’m 85 years old and I produce a singular beautiful contribution to the field of mechanistic interpretability. You should probably follow along so you don’t miss it.

The content, though?

I read a lot of papers for my degree (which is computational neuroscience) and I want to talk about them. They’re mostly about:

cognitive maps
place cells and grid cells
continual learning

Hopefully this is a cool niche that people will be interested in, and one day I’ll write up something about my thesis as well.