Gwern

I talk with people all the time who have done these quite challenging, impressive technical projects or AI projects which would be a meaningful, valuable contribution if they would just turn what they just told me in the chat into a blog post, and yet they don’t.[2] And so no one else ever knows about it. There’s many such cases.

If you don’t have an idea for something good to write, well just do an experiment on yourself and it’s easy to pick a unique experiment that no one has ever done before and boom, now you have something to write about and analyze.

I feel like that was in part, I got much better at the skill of noticing things and thinking harder about predicting things. Also, there is just a thing where after a while every idea feeds on itself and builds on itself, you like to pick up a whole collection of useful ideas which you can apply to everything. I love… Gian-Carlo Rota has a good quote for how he does research where he said like, “Everyone has two mental tools that they apply to every problem, and a great mathematician will have 3.”