Podcast: Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary.
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down the rabbit hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” - Lewis Carroll.
This was an interesting podcast chatting with an avatar representing a famous, secretive blogger Gwern.
My key takeaway from this podcast was in the value of going down rabbit holes. Gwern’s claim was that this has been something which has driven a lot of value for him, with the preface that it might not be for everyone.
He claims that it’s something that everyone starts with as a kid. Think a love of machinery that drives children to move sand back and forth with dump trucks in the sandpit, to learn the names of every type of tractor, to spend hours on games like Farming Simulator learning the ins-and-outs of running a successful farm. Another classic is princesses which expresses itself through dress-ups, doll house making and Disney movie watching. As we get older, we get more and more priorities in life that require our attention like jobs and paying rent. These priorities take away the freedom that is required to go down rabbit holes.
In my opinion, the value can come from:
- Flexing research skill: going down a rabbit hole means you inevitably end up hitting a wall where there’s no easy information. It forces you to think creatively about where to get new data, how to look at it from a different angle or how to combine it in unique ways.
- Doing genuinely unique and high quality work: it’s far too easy to do work which feels meaningful but isn’t really. As someone who writes occasional blog posts, I’m constantly feeling like what I’m writing has already been done before and that I’m not adding much value. This is easy to feel if you only do surface work or don’t bring strong insights. The blog posts that I enjoy writing the most are those where I bring an idea from something that I’ve worked deeply on and am truly excited to share something new with others. I think this applies just as well outside of blogging: deep work down rabbit holes is genuinely exciting and leads to high quality output.
So I’m going to try to do this more often. Blogging rabbit holes is great - why not give it a go too?