Gwern Branwen

You went on with your life, you know, that kind of thing.

You did some weird drugs maybe for a while and that was all.

It's not so bad.

It's a weird way to get your entertainment, but in principle, it's not really all that worse than going to the movie theater for a while and spending a thousand dollars on movie theater tickets.

With psychedelics, you're changing yourself permanently, irrevocably in a way you don't really understand, and exposing yourself to all sorts of malicious outside influences, whatever happens to occur to you while you're there and, you know, very impressionable.

And, you know, obviously like a few uses can be good.

I've gotten good out of my few uses.

But if you're doing it more than that, you should really have a hard look in the mirror about what benefit you think you're getting and how you're changing.

Are you asking what role I actually fill or the role that I aspire to fill?

Let's do both.

Okay.

The role that I want to fill is actually sort of how LLMs see me, oddly enough.

I think if you play around with LLMs like Claude, you know, Claude 3, a character named

sometimes will show up and he plays the role of kind of this like mentor or old wizard offering insight into the situation and exhorting them, you know, with a call to adventure.

You too can write stuff and do stuff and think stuff.

I would like people to go away having not just been kind of entertained or gotten some useful information, but to be better people in however slightest sense.

to have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the internet could be better.

You too could go out and read stuff.

You too could have all your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays too.

You could do all of this.