Interview with gwern

www.gwern.net

Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.

There have been multiple times where I read a comment somewhere; thought to myself, wow, this guy is brilliant, let me see who wrote it so I can see if there are other things they've written; and, lo and behold, gwern.

Yeah. Nick Szabo used to show up a lot, too.

Analogous to the 1% Rule [0]:

> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the limitations of the human mind as we evolved in relatively small groups/tribes and it might be difficult to see beyond that

I don't know what the current HN usage stats are, but assume you would still need to explain about 3 additional orders of magnitude to get from 1% of HN down to "a few dozen".

It doesn't necessarily literally mean 1%, it's just an informal rule emphasizing the power law nature of creators of content versus its consumers.

This also might just mean that you're interested in X thing, and the writing you find interesting is by people in the same subculture.

A hundred years ago you could say the same about the Bloomsbury Group.

I don't know what causes such intellectual cliques to form, perhaps it's a result of an intersection of raw intellectual power and social dynamics.

It's ChrisMarshallNY for me. So frequently I'll come to a comment chain on Apple or Swift or NYC stuff with the intention to make a sweet point, only to find Chris has already said the same thing, though much more eloquently.

He's been building software for 10 years longer than I've been alive, hopefully in a few decades I'll have gained the same breadth of technical perspective he's got.

A thread comment from TeMPOraL is always a nice surprise.