Gwern Branwen

You're not really digging the hole.

And it's not really rabbit hole then, right?

It's just something you're like somewhat interested in kind of passingly.

A rabbit hole is really obsessive.

Like if you aren't obsessed with it, I think, and not like...

continuously driven by it, it's not a real rabbit hole.

That's my view.

I'd say two or three max if you're spending a lot of time and effort on each one and neglecting everything else.

As for when you exit a rabbit hole, you usually hit a very kind of natural terminus where getting any further answers requires data that just don't exist or you end up having questions that people don't know the answer to.

You reach this point where everything kind of dies out and you see no obvious next step.

One example of this would be like when I was interested in analogs to nicotine that might be better than nicotine.

That was a bit of a rabbit hole, but I quickly hit the dead end that there just like are none.

That was a pretty definitive dead end.

And I couldn't get my hands on the metabolites of nicotine as an alternative.

So if there are no analogs and you can't get your hands on the one interesting chemical you find, well, that's that.

That was like a pretty definitive end to that rabbit hole.

When did this start?

Oh, yeah.

Parents could tell you all about that.

I was very much your stereotypical nerdy little kid.