Gwern Branwen

And anyway, at that point, you have more or less the structure of the current essay.

For those essays where there is a kind of like –

individual eureka moment there usually is still a bunch of disparate things that i've been making notes on that i don't even realize are connected they just bother me for a long time um and kind of like sit there bothering me and i keep looking for explanations for each individual one and just not finding them it keeps bothering me keeps bothering me and then one day i i hit kind of that that sudden moment that makes me go bam eureka right these all are connected

I just have to kind of like sit down and write the single gigantic essay that pours out about it.

And then it's done.

That particular essay will just be done at that point, like right in one go.

I might add in links like later on or references, but it won't fundamentally change from that point.

Yeah, someone asked about how I came up with one yesterday, as a matter of fact.

It's one of my oldest essays, The Melancholy of Subculture Society.

For that one, I'd been reading about these miscellaneous things like David Foster Wallace on tennis, people on internet media, like video games.

And then one day it just kind of hit me.

This feeling or observation that it's incredibly sad that we have all these subcultures and tribes online and that they can find community together.

But they're still incredibly isolated from the larger society.

And then one day a flash kind of just hit me about how beautiful and yet also sad this is.

And I just sat down and I wrote down the entire thing more or less.

I haven't really changed it since that much at all.

I've added more links and quotes and examples over time, but nothing important.

The essence was just kind of this like flash.

And I wrote it down while it was there.

That's a hard hitting question, Dorcash.