Excellent blog! Reminded me of Silicon valey series :)))
For me, It is encouraging to see that people in the same insane positions of starting their own company are facing similar problems with me and I am Not the only crazy person around! Starting your own company and fighting the unknown lonely steps of success is undeniably hard,scary and depressing but with some weird manner also extremely rewarding! The high risk always comes with the high satisfaction.
people like me and many others, need to hear it get encouragement and an indirect form of support so useful and valuable to keep you going! I found great pleasure watching silicon valey series for this exact reason; and listening to real people having similar issues is even better x
I am afraid I have to be honest and say that I completely disagree on taking away he's degree because of faculty's inability to check the reliability and credibility of their applicants! Since he completed all course, was able to follow up with everything it shows the he well deserved it! At the same time, perhaps Stanford should have had a better check on their applicants and not take away what was well deserves! That's my personal opinion!
Loved your article - inspiring and I can definitely see your point! Sharing my personal experience I left academia a year ago (leaving a promising neuroinformatics career) to what it seems crazy starting my own company! I now make at Lear ten times more money that what I used to make, I work only half weekends, I can sleep at night without the
Need of drinking alcohol before bed ( yes it was necessary with the stress of publications) and I enjoy my friends and family! I don't know if company will go well but I know
I am now happy! Very well done to you and good luck x
Just a short note on the "we do not understand the brain and thus are not able to design more sophisticated methods to treat this terrible decease"
Allow me to disagree.
We do not need to understand how the brain works in order to be able to find treatments for all the different mental deceases.
Its all trials and errors, hypothesis -> testing -> result, again and again and again until a final conclusion!
I have spend a lot of years researching the brain, the black box which everyone wants to understand but no-one has any clue about it and more specifically Alzheimer's disease (not in a pharmaceutical company but in academia).
From my experience, we don't need to understand how something works if we know what is the most likely outcome for a given input.
I was lucky enough to test different types of drugs, their long term and short term effects, how useful they are and of course what effects have in behaviour etc. From every single study I could put a piece of puzzle right there and be able to see a clearer picture of what's going on, make hypothesis, tests hypotheses, have controls, tests controls etc. I obviously have no clue how the brain works but for those things I checked I know:
Given an input -> Brain -> I get an particular output most likely*
From that (and of course many control studies), I could trust that this drugs will most likely give me the predicted output. And that's how research is done..Is not always correct but based on that, we managed to be where we are, to have drugs for diseases which in the past killed us and step by step we can move forward and it would be wrong to doubt how much improvement has been done so far by the research community.
I am not suggesting you to trust anti-psychotic, just suggesting you that in my personal opinion, is wrong not trusting a drug (which you of course are well aware for advantages/ disadvantages) just because you don't know how brain works...Many other drugs which are for simple diseases actually affect your brain in many similar ways as anti-psychotics.
According to Piaget's theory of development while we grow up we have different experiences from which we acquire new information. If we lets say, are naive with no experiences or memories at all, otherwise known as a "tabula rasa" stage, then we will start learning this new information and grouping it into correlated structures of knowledge, known as schemas. For example, different types of dogs can be one schema as they share characteristics and they are correlated knowledge..As we learn we not only create these schemas, but we also adapt them when new unknown information arrives. For example, if I only experience dog in my life, then when I see a cat I know that this is likely to be an animal and share characteristics with dogs, as this is similar to dogs and will most likely belong to the same or a similar schema..And that's how I personally believe we learn and interpret new information that arrives...
Of course there are many different theories, but that's my favourite.
For me, It is encouraging to see that people in the same insane positions of starting their own company are facing similar problems with me and I am Not the only crazy person around! Starting your own company and fighting the unknown lonely steps of success is undeniably hard,scary and depressing but with some weird manner also extremely rewarding! The high risk always comes with the high satisfaction.
people like me and many others, need to hear it get encouragement and an indirect form of support so useful and valuable to keep you going! I found great pleasure watching silicon valey series for this exact reason; and listening to real people having similar issues is even better x