Who says Gwern is even human?
I met him at a Slate Star Codex meetup in 2018 and at a conference in 2022.
How do you know?
Interview with gwern
71–80 of 262 posts
Re: Interview with gwern
#72Benefits of anonymity: “ I have derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to mail heroin to my home and call the police to SWAT me”
Downsides of anonymity: no free heroin
Re: Interview with gwern
#73It'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]. 0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ
I found the conversation between Wolfram and Yudkowsky hard to listen to. In fact, I didn't make it to the half. The arguments presented by both were sort of weak and uninteresting?
I find any conversation these days involving Wolfram or Yudkowsky hard to listen to. Them trying to talk to each other... I'd imagine them talking completely past each other, and am happy not to have to verify that.
Re: Interview with gwern
#74I 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 writ…
[deleted]
Re: Interview with gwern
#75It'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]. 0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ
I found the conversation between Wolfram and Yudkowsky hard to listen to. In fact, I didn't make it to the half. The arguments presented by both were sort of weak and uninteresting?
That’s an excellent use for an AI generated TL;DR.
Re: Interview with gwern
#76By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…
I think the wider question mark about that sentence is that even if LLMs that ingest the internet and turn it into different words are the future of humanity, there's an awful lot of stuff in an AI corpus and a comparatively small number intensively researched blogs probably aren't going to shift the needle very much
I mean, you'd probably get more of a vote using generative AI to spam stuff that aligns with your opinions or moving to Kenya to do low wage RHLF stuff...
Re: Interview with gwern
#77I 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 writ…
There is a comment on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit with supposedly true information about him (which I found googling 'who is gwern'), but it left me with even more questions. EDIT: grammar
That comment is just a fanciful flight of whimsy.
> Gwern was the first patient to successfully complete a medical transition to the gender he was originally assigned at birth... his older brother died of a Nuvigil overdose in 2001... his (rather tasteful) neck tattoo of the modafinil molecule
The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation.
He does have a neck tattoo, but it's actually a QR code containing the minimal weights to label MNIST at 99% accuracy.
Re: Interview with gwern
#78> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.”
The link in this paragraph goes to a post on gwern website. This post contains various links, both internal and external. But I still failed to find one that supports claims about Newton's views on "progress".
> This offers a little twist on the “Singularity” idea: apparently people have always been able to see progress as rapid in the right time periods, and they are not wrong to! We would not be too impressed at several centuries with merely some shipbuilding improvements or a long philosophy poem written in Latin, and we are only modestly impressed by needles or printing presses.
We absolutely _are_ impressed. The concept of "rapid progress" is relative. There was rapid progress then, and there is even more rapid progress now. There is no contradiction.
Anyway, I have no idea how this interview got that many upvotes. I just wasted my time.
Re: Interview with gwern
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dwarkesh Patel > How do you sustain yourself while writing full time? > Gwern > Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last. Then Dwarkesh just gets stuck on this $1k/month thing when Gw…
Meh. He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.
Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen.
A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for example, someone who's an expert in DIY but also a devoted procrastinator. That person could leave a roof in the state described for months or years, planning to eventually do it up, and I wouldn't consider anything terribly revelatory about the person's financial or mental status to have occurred.
Re: Interview with gwern
#80I 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 writ…
Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?
I don't follow gwern's work closely.
But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year.
Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.