Interview with gwern

I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story.

Still, I like a lot of his writing. Especially the weird and niche stuff that most people don’t even stop to think about. And thanks to Gwern’s essay on the sunk costs fallacy, I ended up not getting a tattoo that I had changed my mind about. I almost got it because I had paid a deposit, but I genuinely decided I hated the idea of what I was going to get… and almost got it, but the week before I went to get the tattoo, I read that essay, and decided if small children and animals don’t fall victim to sunk costs, then neither should I! Literally - Gwern saved the skin on my back with his writing. Haha.

There is a comment on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit with supposedly true information about him (which I found googling 'who is gwern'), but it left me with even more questions.

EDIT: grammar

There's some articles on his site about these attempts and they claim that they are all wrong. If it would be that "easily found" I'd guess we wouldn't be having these discussions: https://gwern.net/blackmail#pseudonymity-bounty

Can you link the comment here?

I'm fairly sure it's relatively true (except for occasional extra purchases on top) unless he's been keeping it up in places I wouldn't expect him to.

I don't like that now people might pigeonhole him a bit by thinking about his effective frugality but I do hope he gets a ton of donations (either directly or via patreon.com/gwern ) to make up for it.

Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?

That comment is just a fanciful flight of whimsy.

> Gwern was the first patient to successfully complete a medical transition to the gender he was originally assigned at birth... his older brother died of a Nuvigil overdose in 2001... his (rather tasteful) neck tattoo of the modafinil molecule

The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation.

He does have a neck tattoo, but it's actually a QR code containing the minimal weights to label MNIST at 99% accuracy.

I don't follow gwern's work closely.

But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year.

Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

[1] https://gwern.net/danbooru2021

Hosting large datasets can be expensive but the hosting for the danbooru datasets was not. It's "only" a few terabytes in size. A previous release was 3.4TB, so the latest is probably some hundreds of GB, to a TB~, in size larger. The download was hosted on a hetzner IP, which is a provider known for cheap servers. You can pay them $50/m for a server with "unmetered" 1gigabit up/down network + 16TB of disks. $600 a year would not be difficult.

I met Gwern once, when he came to the NYC Less Wrong meetup. I don't think he was internet-famous yet. It was probably 12 years ago or so, but based on my recollection, I'm totally willing to believe that he lives very frugally. FWIW he wouldn't have looked out of place at an anime convention.

What did he look like?

I believe him.

You believe that someone who has the capacity and resources to do all this fancy computer and AI stuff lives on $12k USD a year? That’s hilarious.

I’m willing to bet he became a millionaire thanks to bitcoin.

I think it would be more odd to take someone with such a shtick at their word, but skepticism abounds either way.

> The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation.

How do you know those things are true?

They aren't, he doesn't even live in Maine.

You clearly don’t know what a Maine Coon is…

I don't really want to do anything to deanonymize a guy who clearly wants to be anonymous. But I will say that at the time he had long hair.

$600 a year is a lot of money..

I think people tend to wildly overestimate how expensive hosting a large dataset has to be, because of cloud.

If you only need a few terabytes, you can rent from Hetzner for more like <$20/month. Maybe <$10 at this point, if you are patient. And you can use the server for other things too, since it's a fixed cost, like your website or encrypted backups or other files you host. I spent a while figuring this out before I decided to do Danbooru20xx, to make sure it was very cheap. Given how my website has grown in size, and how absurdly exorbitant cloud bandwidth and object/hard drive space is, the Danbooru dataset was practically free at the margin!

> Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

Some people are, some people aren't. I'm not. (I have intellectual sympathy with EA, but not emotional.)

Meow

Do people need evidence for an opinion?