Steve Hsu: preference

Transcript context

…By the way, Gwern is such an interesting character. I've been reading him for a long time, but obviously, his persona is very mysterious. Do you know what is going on here? How did this person get into it? It's a really interesting and detailed report he published in every selection. What is going on here? Well, Gwern is a super smart guy! I know a lot of scholars and serious scientists and intellectuals in the academy, and even though I didn't quite agree with his take that you just mentioned–– I mean, it might not be technically wrong, because I'm not sure what he meant by his words. I'm not even sure he would disagree with the quantitative things I just mentioned to you. But, I just want to say some positive things about Gwern because I like to read his stuff. In the early days, he was already following much of this stuff about genomic prediction and embryo selection. He's written stuff on GPT-3 and alignment risk. He's written lots and lots of insightful things. He's quite impressive, even if you compare him to the most, famous academic scholars—whether it's Steve Pinker, or somebody who has written a lot of stuff that people read—and as obviously, been thinking deeply about a lot of different things during the course of a very serious life. I think Gwern is super awesome. He's right up there with those guys. So, it's awesome that we live in this internet age where some totally anonymous dude can produce really good thoughts about a wide variety of things. He's not wrong with most of the stuff he writes about embryo selection—it's pretty much right. I have a very high opinion of Gwern. It's interesting with people like Gwern—it's almost in the model, you can think of early 20th century or late 19th century, these gentleman scholars, who would just pontificate about a lot of different subjects—I wonder if we're gonna see a return of the sort of generalist thinker. Maybe we've over-indexed on specialists, but now it's now the time for somebody like you! Theoretical physics, bringing all of that computational and mathematical knowledge to genomics—is that the new trend in science, at least at the upper levels?…

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