#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/28/25

The weather here in Boston is positively chilly when compared to Tokyo, so I took advantage and went on a nice run and listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an engaging conversation with Xaq Pitkow on principles for theorizing about and experimentally studying cognition on the Brain Inspired podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugorctvkCa0

Next was an interesting talk by Peter Dayan on engineered and natural reinforcement learning at the Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC) 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLA7t4tjhfE

Next was an intriguing talk by Amy Zhang on the intersection of generative AI and reinforcement learning (RL) at the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVDcng-TTII

Next was an excellent talk by Michael Littman on theory-informed efficient RL and AI using interaction and teaching at RLC 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBA3ukUBLNc

Next was an amazing talk by Dale Schuurmans on language models and computation at RLC 2025. Schuurmans uses theoretical computer science tools to investigate the potential capabilities of language models, illuminating their inherent limitations and the doomed attempts to overcome these limitations with compute and data alone. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMEViRcF7o0

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Joelle Pineau on rethinking how reinforcement learning works at RLC 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8f6lMg3gNg

Next was a nice talk by Finale Doshi-Velez on the importance of considering people and UI choices when evaluating AI systems at RLC 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FfkvHjrOtk

Next was a great talk by Matteo Maggiori on data sources and analytics approaches for understanding international trade at the Global Capital Allocation Project (GCAP) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcr97EpSZE

Next was an informative talk also by Matteo Maggiori on public micro data sources at the GCAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYCTXbKY7-Q

Next was "Organized Labor & the Black Worker" by Philip Foner with an important new foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. As always Foner provides an excellent history on a critical topic. The focus here is on Black labor movements and trends from Reconstruction to ~1970, although there's a bit of content outside that. What is continuously hammered home is how terrible working conditions were for Black labor and how real wins largely materialized with strong federal support and solidarity from large unions. Foner doesn't always show his work - statements such as "high unemployment" often aren't accomplished by hard numbers - and he makes the common error of treating the statements of intellectual luminaries such as DuBois and Marx as Truth. Still, Foner mostly reigns in these tendencies later in the book (and serves up some absolutely laugh out loud zingers at the expense of George Meany). Highly recommend https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/991-organized-labor-and-the-black-worker-1619-1981

Last was "VC: An American History" by Tom Nicholas. Rather than starting with ARD as is traditional when examining the history of venture capital, Nicholas goes back to the New Bedford whaling industry and then the Lowell textile mills to demonstrate how these early examples of risk capital look extremely similar to modern VC and set the stage for its emergence. This book is at its best when it sticks to macro trends and quantitative analysis - particularly startling was the similarity of the return distribution of whaling voyages and VC investments, indicating that returns are much more likely to be driven by probability than by any inherent differences in intermediaries. The neoliberal bent in the book can be distracting (e.g. was the Ford corporation really an unalloyed good for the US?), and I would've loved an examination of why productivity growth in the US slowed precisely when VC emerged as a significant market force if it actually promotes innovation better than alternatives. I also found the individual cases, a staple of HBS classrooms, not useful since without a macro perspective to validate observations on the cases I had no way to discern if these investors were actually right or just rich and lucky (counterfactuals also remain unexplored here). Still, the historical perspective on why the VC industry has taken on its current form - both in terms of business model and geographic distribution - are essential for understanding the finance and tech industry and the arc of the US economy more broadly. Highly recommend https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674988002