Gwern Branwen

How have I amputated my life in order to write?

I think I've amputated my life in many respects, professionally and personally, especially in terms of travel.

There are many people I envy for their ability to kind of travel and socialize or for their power and their positions in places like Anthropic where they're insiders.

I've sacrificed whatever career I could have had or whatever fun lifestyle to

A digital nomad lifestyle and going outdoors, being a Buddhist monk or maybe a fancy trader.

All those have to be sacrificed really for the patient work of sitting down every day and reading papers until my eyes bleed and hoping that something good comes out of it someday.

I can't be or be compared to Tyler Cowen here.

Tyler Cowen is a one man industry.

Yeah, but he can't be replicated.

So I just can't be Tyler Cowen.

You know, Jack Clark, he's also his own thing.

He's able to write the stories and his issues very well while also being a policy person.

I respect those people.

You know, I admire them.

But none of them, I think, quite hit my particular interest and niche of following weird topics for a long period of time.

and then collating, kind of sorting through the information.

For me, that just requires a large commitment to reading vast masses of things in hopes that some tiny detail perhaps will turn out one day to be important.

So, I mean, the workflow right now is more like I wake up, I do normal morning things, and then I clean up the previous day's work on the website.

I'll deal with kind of various issues like formatting or spelling errors, and I kind of

review it and think if I've properly collated everything and put it in the right places from the previous day.