I recently discovered gwern.net and it’s just this guy’s website, but he seems like a cool guy, even if the folks at MIRI are citing him (which really feels like it should be an indictment, but everyone over there seems to be having fun because if you genuinely believe that the case you make in your book titled “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies”1 was true, you probably wouldn’t be a) selling it or b) delaying publication so that you can collect preorders, but maybe I’m just crazy) .
Anyhow, after that exceedingly long parenthetical aside, I just want to say that I really appreciate the way he’s trying to take the site, and, aside from the existential dread of potentially writing something stupid that I don’t want quoted to an employer three weeks after being hired2, it could be fun to do something similar of my own, though probably with less AI and more incoherent ramblings.3 If you need something to poke around in for a few hours and have somehow misplaced your copy of the bible, local news, and collected works of Charles Dickens, I’d say that it’s worth a read; my sources tell me that Gwern’s endorsement of spaced repetition is legit.
Footnotes
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I’m quoting the title of the book from memory and don’t actually know if it’s correct or not. Whatever the case, I’m confident I got the gist of it. ↩
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See the recent case of Senator Lankford’s hiring of Matthew Arbo ↩
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I can’t do specific word counts on substack, but I’m confident that if I went through the effort of copyediting the long rambles at the end of these poems, I would discover that this sentence is entirely too long. ↩