On the AI side of the fence the approach has been "let's see just how far Reinforcement Learning can take us, and then start making up stories (hypothesis) about what the secret ingredients are that are missing." On the neuroscience side of things my sense is that that's not a question that can be empirically answered any time soon. This experiment was interesting because they new what they were looking for going in. "What algo are these cells running?" is a hard question, "are these cells' firing activities consistent with this given algo is comparatively easy. Inference vs hypothesis testing.
I think the point was that at one point Epstein and Cosby were as powerless as a railroadable undergrad. Dialing in the right false positive / false negative tradeoff us hard.
Some thoughts on why this is. With VC the customer is actually future investors, and the true product is a pitch deck. Everything else is a prop. At first this seems crazy, but when you consider wealth inequality it becomes clear that the really money is made convincing very rich people to deploy their capital, not in providing valuable goods or services to workers.
> really money is made convincing very rich people to deploy their capital
The industry could use more literature on the "court politics" of this process, including what happens socially if you lose the capital of those rich people, have a disagreement on strategic direction, or partner with rich people who themselves disagree on direction.
