Interview with gwern
dwarkeshpatel.com
Interview with gwern
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Re: Interview with gwern
#2Their voice sounds so realistic, that unlike the avatar, my monkey brain is not fathoming it being unreal.
Re: Interview with gwern
#3Their voice sounds so realistic, that unlike the avatar, my monkey brain is not fathoming it being unreal.
From https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen:
"In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
Re: Interview with gwern
#4Their voice sounds so realistic, that unlike the avatar, my monkey brain is not fathoming it being unreal.
From https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen : "In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
The "ums", "rights", "likes", "kindas", and up-talk were completely unnecessary, though, and their presence just detracts from the product.
Re: Interview with gwern
#5Technically he's pseudonymous. I don't know if he always had the (fictional) last name "Branwen", but I have records of "gwern" (all lowercase) going way back. And yes I'm pretty sure it was the same person.
He says he has collaborators under the "Gwern" name now, but the main guy is the main guy and it's unlikely he could hide it.
How many citations for "Branwen 2018" are on the ArXiv now?
Re: Interview with gwern
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
From https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen : "In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
The "ums", "rights", "likes", "kindas", and up-talk were completely unnecessary, though, and their presence just detracts from the product.
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Re: Interview with gwern
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
From https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen : "In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed."
The "ums", "rights", "likes", "kindas", and up-talk were completely unnecessary, though, and their presence just detracts from the product.
It's fine. I don't know how Gwern actually talks, but unless Patel was going to get an experienced voice actor I'm not sure how much better it could be.
Re: Interview with gwern
#8It's been a bumper week for interesting podcast interviews with an AI theme!
In addition to this, there are Lex Fridman's series of interviews with various key people from Anthropic [0], and a long discussion between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the theme of AI risk [1].
Re: Interview with gwern
#9I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona.
When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story.
Still, I like a lot of his writing. Especially the weird and niche stuff that most people don’t even stop to think about. And thanks to Gwern’s essay on the sunk costs fallacy, I ended up not getting a tattoo that I had changed my mind about. I almost got it because I had paid a deposit, but I genuinely decided I hated the idea of what I was going to get… and almost got it, but the week before I went to get the tattoo, I read that essay, and decided if small children and animals don’t fall victim to sunk costs, then neither should I! Literally - Gwern saved the skin on my back with his writing. Haha.
Re: Interview with gwern
#10www.gwern.net
Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.