Gwern: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was your first big hit? Silk Road. I had been a little bit interested in Bitcoin, but not too seriously interested in it because it was not obvious to me that it was going to work out, or even was technologically feasible. But when Adrian Chen wrote his Gawker article about buying LSD off Silk Road, all of a sudden I did a complete 180. I had this moment of, “Holy shit, this is so real that you can buy drugs off the Internet with it!” I looked into the Chen article and it was very obvious to me that people wanted to know what the ordering process was like. They wanted more details about what it’s like, because the article was very brief about that. It didn't go into any real detail about the process. So I thought, “Okay, I'm interested in nootropics. I'm interested in drugs. I will go and use Silk Road. I will document it for everyone, instead of everyone pussyfooting around it online and saying, ‘Oh, a friend of mine ordered off Silk Road and it worked.’ None of that bullshit. I will just document it straightforwardly.” I ordered some Adderall, I think it was, and documented the entire process with screenshots. I wrote it up and wrote some more on the intellectual background. That was a huge hit when I published it. It was hundreds of thousands of hits. It's crazy. Even today when I go to the Google Analytics charts, you can still see “Silk Road” spiking vertically like crazy and then falling back down. Nothing else really comes near it in terms of traffic. That was really quite something, to see things go viral like that. What are the counterfactual career trajectories and life paths that could have been for you if you didn’t become an online writer? What might you be doing instead that seems plausible?…

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