Gwern: preference

Transcript context

…So walk me through this process. You talked about reading papers until your eyes bleed at the end of the day. You wake up in the morning and you go straight to the papers? What does your day look like? 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 deal with various issues, like formatting or spelling errors. I review it and think if I properly collated everything and put it in the right places. Sometimes I might have an extra thought that I need to add in or make a comment that I realize was important. That's the first step. After that, I often will shamelessly go to Twitter or my RSS feed and just read a large amount until perhaps I get distracted by a comment or a question from someone and maybe do some writing on that. After that, I take a break for lunch or whatever, and then go back to that and just keep going at it. Somewhere around evening, I will often get exhausted from all that, and try to do a real project or contribution to something. I’ll actually sit down and work on whatever I'm supposed to be working on that day. After that, I would typically go to the gym. By that point, I really am burned out from everything. Yes, I like going to the gym—not because I'm any kind of meathead or athlete or even really enjoy weightlifting—but because it's the most diametrically opposite thing I can do to sitting in front of a computer. This is your theory of burnout, right? That you have to do the exact opposite?…

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