Light Blogging

I’ve been blogging less recently, but I hope to return to it as a full-time hobby at some point.

I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to make myself better at my job. Reading books about R programming, taking courses on Datacamp, and reading about various machine-learning topics. I’m really trying to up my game here. I’d like to have a thorough understanding of exactly how all of these algorithms work. Like, if I wanted to build a simple gbm neural net on a small dataset, I want to show what these look like as (for example) a series of formulas in an Excel workbook. Any monkey can use these methods. Just plug the arguments into a function that somebody else wrote for you. It’s not even that hard to explain what they are doing, in basic English in summary form anyway. I’m trying to make myself stand out by understanding how they work in excruciating detail. 

I’m also working on a paper on opioids, which should get published in Cato. I’ll share more details when I can but I’m trying to 1) maintain some level of anonymity and 2) avoid scooping the paper in any way. I've learned some very interesting things about this topic in the past few months. Maybe I'll discuss some of them here after the paper comes out. 

Thanks for your patience. I’ll get back in full swing in the coming months. There is much to discuss!