Interview with gwern

>I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so old that the humidity had decayed the wood. We just got a bunch of scrap wood and a joist and propped it up. If it lets in some bugs, oh well! I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.

Not sure what to think of that. On one hand, it's so impressive that gwern cares only about the intellectual pursuit. On the other hand, it's sad that society does not reward it as much as excel sheet work.

> How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?

> Gwern

> Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.

Then Dwarkesh just gets stuck on this $1k/month thing when Gwern right out of gate said that savings are being used.

Who knows how much of the savings are being used or how big of a profit he got from BTC.

He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for example, someone who's an expert in DIY but also a devoted procrastinator. That person could leave a roof in the state described for months or years, planning to eventually do it up, and I wouldn't consider anything terribly revelatory about the person's financial or mental status to have occurred.

But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

- ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case.

- 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on how much of it is disposable. You live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter.

- no healthcare =/= bad health. How many of the growing numbers of people dying from heart-related diseases in their 50s and 60s had healthcare? Didn't do much for them, in the end.

- collapsing floor =/= bad hygiene or something else actually potentially dangerous, as I said above, the nuisance this causes or doesn't cause depends on lots of actual real factors, it's not some absolute thing. It just sounds wild to people not used to it

I agree that 12k goes a long way when you're a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance.

Nonetheless, that's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

"no health insurance" is the only thing in your list there that isn't hyperbole or a twisting of what was said. But anyway, again, no-one is arguing about whether 12,000/year "officially" is or is not below the poverty line, except you, with yourself.

Did you read the part about him having savings in bitcoin that wouldn't sustain him forever, but nonetheless for many, many years? If the bitcoin was worth 500,000, for example, would you then say "oh, that's a totally acceptable way to live now!", or would you still be belittling their life choices, insinuating there was something bad or wrong with it?