Armand

most are probably safe as long as you get them from a good source and they only contain the stated drug product, but we simply can't know this without a lot more work

it is unbelievably hard to understand how safe a drug is, for most peptides anyone who tells you they are *definitely* safe is either lying to you or very confused

the two main culprits are cerebrolysin and cortexin

do not inject these, i put at least 10% odds on their being another prion disease wave (eg mad cow) (or just direct amyloid seeding -> AD?) in the next two decades because of this

one of the problems with the new peptide craze is that people unfamiliar with how hard it is to actually understand drug biology treat risk monolithically when it is anything but

this tweet inspired by my absolute horror of people injecting pig brain lysates into their body

Gell-Mann amnesia effect - Wikipedia

the further their area of expertise is from my technical experience the harder it is for me to judge them from just a conversation

it was not super obvious to me that this was true in the beginning tho!

it's a form of Gell-Mann amnesia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-M...

for example one thing I've learned is that for pure scientists, roughly in my sphere of knowledge, I am great at assessing them from just talking to them

one good way to do this is to formally measure you and your team's ability to predict who will be a great candidate to a) find your superpredictors and b) uncover the the heuristics underlying your team's models that lead to both good and bad predictions

in the longer run you should keep training your internal model and intuition for what makes someone great

if I feel unsure about someone we won't hire them unless at least one other person on the hiring team has high enough conviction to actively fight for them

and we always pass if one person has high conviction they won't be a great fit and we can't resolve

examples of the latter include: work trials, extensive ref checks (we do 9 minimum for everyone above RA), back-channeling, and having a diverse recruiting team that you trust such that at least a few people will have high s/n for any given candidate

so if you think someone could be great but feel uncertain about them you should immediately either pass or figure out if there is some other metric by which you can judge them with high conviction

tough in the moment but so, so worth it in the long run, especially for early hires: a core nucleus of people who are 100% amazing makes all subsequent hiring so much easier

we've had multiple roles where we've taken this tradeoff which sometimes meant running an interview process for an entire year until we found the right person

it's essentially a form of sacrifice—trading off someone who could be great rn for someone who definitely will be great later on—which sounds easy from the outside but becomes a much harder decision to make in the trenches when you are trying to scale your co as fast as possible

in practice this cashes out to being ok with waiting longer than you want for the candidate that you 100% know is a rockstar rather than the one whom you think might be

the corollary of this is that you should pass on people who you think could be great but aren't sure about as fast as possible in order to get to the candidates that you *know* are great

one mistake early founders often make is that they think they should be able to accurately assess every single candidate in a recruiting process

unfortunately the candidates where you have high s/n is somewhat stochastic, based on your experience so far

I squeaked over the 2k followers mark on the last day of 2024. Let's see how it goes in 2025!

love this!

Since yesterday, I have been able to add:
@kamatsiddhesh.bsky.social
@balynzaro.bsky.social
@armand.bsky.social (Armand Cognetta)
@xingyuliu9595.bsky.social
@vincorine.bsky.social (Benjamin Horning)

How to have ideas a framework for effective ideation

wrote a little more here!

writing.arman.do/p/how-to-ha...

8/ [bonus] take lots of showers

this is my personal hack, to the point where if I’m feeling stuck in my life I’ll consciously make an effort to take more/longer showers. I rarely get out of the shower without an idea or two to write about, think about, or work on

...And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
–Rainer Maria Rilke

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them...

...Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions."
–Henrik Karlsson

"One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses...

7/ embrace uncertainty

creativity loves uncertainty. notice when you become confused or are entertaining two conflicting viewpoints, and just allow yourself to sit in that tension.

"Without great solitude, no serious work is possible."
–Pablo Picasso

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."
–Friedrich Nietzsche

"The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."
–Amos Tversky

6/ make space for ideation

a certain amount of chaos is good for creativity but if your mind is too cluttered or distracted mind it will probably hurt more than it helps. give yourself solitude, let yourself become bored, allow your mind to wander. solvitur ambulando.

A quote by Rainer Maria Rilke Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if pos...

a few months at least read the history of the great ideas, learn the rules, then forget them and let them sink into your blood: www.goodreads.com/quotes/3242...