Gwern: belief

Transcript context

…How do you determine when to quit a rabbit hole? And how many rabbit holes do you concurrently have going on at the same time? You can only really explore two or three rabbit holes simultaneously. Otherwise, you aren't putting real effort into each one. You’re not really digging the hole, it's not really a rabbit hole. It's just something you are somewhat interested in. A rabbit hole is really obsessive. If you aren't obsessed with it and continually driven by it, it's not a 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 natural terminus where getting any further answers requires data that do not exist or you have questions that people don't know the answer to. You reach a point where everything dies out and you see no obvious next step. One example would be 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 are none. That was a pretty definitive dead end. 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's a pretty definitive end to that rabbit hole. Have you always been the kind of person who falls into rabbit holes? When did this start?…

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