Gwern, Anti-Assorting, and the Smart Box
"One of the greatest polymathic thinkers of our time"
If you look into Gwern Branwen, you might start to realize he (yes i'm assuming his gender) is a very intelligent person. His writing is fantastic, his digital caligraphy (the dropcats) are beautifully ornate and european. He is praised in nearly every writing about him that exists despite being more-or-less a pseudononymous person.
I recently read one of his posts, in particular the one about anti-assorting: https://gwern.net/unsort
This blew me away when I read it. In a world where the skibidi toilet creator makes more money than most doctors, finally, some signs of deep analysis mixed with creative problem solving and taking the full hollistic picture into account.
This person clearly deserves much of the praise they recieve and can probably back up the claims others make about them, regardless of their personal ego.
Context
The date range for this particular post is 2019-11-24 –> 2024-11-04. Roughly about 5 years. So clearly he takes long drawn out periods of time to finish his work and refines it with very deep thought. You can't get that level of writing by staring at a blank editor, or even tweaking ChatGPT output. It's clearly higher quality.
The Actual Content
Without trying to repeat what was already said, I will comment on a particular fascination with the long-term sequencing based on user patterns he describes.
The Dark Side
What should concern everyone is the disconnect here. Americans are often thought of as fat and stupid (Gwern is American. & yes they mostly are). Yet here we have an American who clearly knows their shit, with experience and credential to back it up, and is able to concisely elaborate on those points and package it into a hollistic approach to problem solving.
To me, that is terrifying.
For all of the praise Gwern recieves, for all of the ego's he might boost by people who treat him as revered, clearly no one is listening to him.
You still screw up the entire YouTube algorithm just for watching one type of video that isn't your typical content preference. You still get trash Netflix recommendations based on the most immediate thing you watched. TikTok seems to have listened, but ironically, that is not an American company no matter how much they try to gaslight about it "technically" being American. Spotify music shuffling also didn't listen. Western society has praised Gwern and rejected him at the same time.
It is like we put him in a box, just to be there and admire him, but not to actually give him real authority.
The Smart Box
One of many issues of our time is what i'll call the smart box. We put Gwern in the smart box. He's like a lil high IQ puppy. Give him all the treats and pampering he wants, feel good about yourself when you're around him, but never let him out of the cage and never implement any of his ideas. Clearly no one with positions of power is actually ever going to read any of that shit and actually implement it. Even smaller organizations seem to have literally no interest in actually applying most of what he writes about. People don't even steal the dropcats, they just admire them.
Gwern is trapped in the smart box. The smart box is not a good thing. It's like a wild Tiger being stuck in the zoo, unable to leap and kill as its spirit more deeply desires.
There is a darkly dystopian undertone towards the disconnect of the praise he recieves and the lack of serious consideration given to "actually investing in or implementing his ideas for our business or organization".
If you aspire to be a big brain, whether out of genuine knowledge pursuit, or just because you're an egotistical jackass, your best case scenario is probably landing in the smart box.
You won't have to pay your bills anymore, people will ACT like they are taking you seriously, but no one will actually take you seriously beyond certain occassion or contexts.
Gwern is probably qualified to walk into the middle of an Nvidia board room meeting and give genuine commentary on the direction the corporation should go, but I doubt anyone is going to ever let him do that. Maybe he would get honorarily invited into the meeting, but still be trapped in the smart box.
I'd actually rather be a complete idiot than be hyperintelligent and incapable of applying my know-how anywhere.
This is worse than pretention (Although I can complete imagine someone being a pretentious shit just because they are literate enough to read a Gwern post), this is snuffing out what it means to qualify and re-writing the game of merit.