I wouldn’t have guessed just from the landing page that he’s the discoverer of backprop, respected former program director at the NSF, etc.
That’s what makes it alpha! If he was as legible as, say, Hinton, he would be mined out by now, and nothing but beta. (Similar situation to Schmidhuber - ‘obvious crackpot’ - although he’s such a self-promoter that he overcomes it, and so at this point there’s no alpha talking to him; the stuff that would be interesting, like his relationship to certain wealthy Italians, or to King Bonesaws, or how he’s managed to torpedo his career so spectacularly, he will not talk about. Also, I understand he likes to charge people for the privilege of talking to him.) You have to have both domain knowledge and intellectual courage to know about Werbos and eg. read his old interviews and be willing to go out on a limb and interview him.
Probably https://gwern.net/newsletter/2021/05#master-synthesis
That’s what makes it alpha! If he was as legible as, say, Hinton, he would be mined out by now, and nothing but beta. (Similar situation to Schmidhuber - ‘obvious crackpot’ - although he’s such a self-promoter that he overcomes it, and so at this point there’s no alpha talking to him; the stuff that would be interesting, like his relationship to certain wealthy Italians, or to King Bonesaws, or how he’s managed to torpedo his career so spectacularly, he will not talk about. Also, I understand he likes to charge people for the privilege of talking to him.) You have to have both domain knowledge and intellectual courage to know about Werbos and eg. read his old interviews and be willing to go out on a limb and interview him.