Thinking by Derivations

Today, I spent some time watching Stanford CS224: Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning, on policy gradients. The lecture was quite informative (of course, given that Chelsea Finn was the instructor), but a few of the lessons I took away had nothing to do with RL math and algorithms.

The first came when Dr. Finn broke down the gradient updates in a vanilla policy gradient algorithm. The topic itself is irrelevant here; the insight came from her mathematical derivations. Once you take the time to actually start from first principles and, with each line of mathematical thinking and logic, get closer to the final result or algorithm, it teaches you something interesting. Yes, it's important to think from first principles and to have that as a baseline, but it is equally important to learn to think layer by layer, or nth-order thinking. This can be a major influence on good, decisive, and logical decision-making later in life. Not skipping derivations, not being lazy in understanding, and not simply memorizing a formula and applying it, I've come to realize, not only gives you a much richer understanding of the topic and a way to come up with new ideas through this medium of thinking, but also helps you make critical decisions at the right time.

It takes time to master and effort to sit down and do it. But that is what counts.

The next insight from this lecture is a seemingly unobvious connection: the thinking process that mathematical derivations teach us can also be exercised in other forms of communication. To reiterate, this process, over time, inherently builds an intuition for layered thinking. Let's take a turn for a moment.

Storytelling and communication are central to my career. As someone who will be a deeptech founder and CEO, this is undoubtedly one of the most important soft skills I will need to develop. From months of intentionally working to improve these communication skills, I have found that the best way to narrate, convince, and persuade is by thinking from first principles and using the same layered approach. If you start your story from something small and slowly work toward an end goal, it becomes so much more interesting. If you're trying to convince someone to believe in you and your work, starting from something both parties can agree on and understand, then inching toward a framework that brings them around, eventually it becomes easy for them to take your side.

I believe this is a very powerful framework if applied right.

On another note, I've become more intentional about making connections like these, building insights and a deeper understanding of how to dominate in whatever I do.

More soon.