Interview with gwern

Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him. It is also kinda scary that so many people are attracted to this. It rhymes with how I feel about Ayn Rand. Her individualism always seems so misanthropic, her adherants scare me

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every major 20th century intellectual had misanthropic undertones (and sometimes overtones) - people who read/think/write an exceptional amount don't tend to be super people-loving.

I've never really experienced that from his writing, and I am definitely not an Ayn Rand fan. I'm also pretty sure he's not interested in creating a movement that could have 'adherents'... I suppose I could be wrong on that. But on the contrary, I find his writing to be often quite life-affirming - he seems to delight in deep focus on various interesting topics.

The worst I can say is that I find his predictions around AI (i.e. the scaling laws) to be concerning.

edit: having now read the linked interview, I can provide a clearly non-misanthropic quote, in response to the interviewer asking gwern what kind of role he hopes to play in people's lives:

  I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”

Everything? He also writes things like this: "A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers."

https://gwern.net/improvement

It’s possible that a person can enjoy things that cater to the advancement of “civilization” while being seen as someone indifferent to (or inclined away from) “humanity”. Ie, a materialist.

That should depend on what you read. There's more than enough in the history of our species and in books about us to make someone love humanity too, at least conceptually if not in daily practice.