Niplav asks “where do you see Croissanthology.com in 10 years?” Oh: “a book”. Gwern claims this is a dangerous idea, but I’m not sure it applies in my case, i.e. that I don’t wish for the site to be a published book, but rather, simply, a physical artifact I can hold in my hands, with my actual name on it, and every essay I’m proud of within.

“Do I ever write anything of quality”

I think part of my desire is explained by the fact I want to be sure I can write essays I’m proud of. Reddit user Sol_hando suggests there’s sort of a “word horizon” that someone can write in a coherent manner, and that this doesn’t really vary across your lifetime. For some people it’s practically zero, and they never get anything of note into the training corpus.1 For norvid_studies it’s somewhere on the order of 240 characters, such that he’s gotten over a million words out in a few years. For Scott Alexander, seemingly it’s “around the size of an ACX post” (see Sol_hando post). For Gwern it’s either on the order of Speedrunning is Not Such a Waste of Talent where he manages to bang out an essay in one sitting, or on the order of On Really Trying, where it’s not “one Gwern” so much as “dozens of Gwerns”2 who’ve participated to making that article what it is today (lists are of course particularly seductive for a writer who often has a writing horizon of just a few paragraphs: see e.g. Alexey Guzey). Anyway one lingering doubt for myself is whether I have a word horizon beyond “a few paragraphs on twitter dot com”. After all, are the base rates not worrying?

I am born to a generation that is, according to some, fated to become “post-cognitive husks”; I sleep with my phone underneath my pillow, touch it frequently like a talisman, depend on it for reassurance; I have lost the ability to write on paper with a pencil without busting my wrist in less than two sentences. Because if I am cut from the noosphere, what is to become of me? I don’t mind this life, unlike some. Certainly I do not touch any of the dreaded “shorts-content platforms”, or choose to do anything else than what I reckon to be healthy intellectual content. But still, I’m sometimes visited by the ghost of a doubt that is “have I busted my attention span?” If I no longer read any books (and I don’t, not really, and when I do it’s only halfway through), does that truncate my words horizon?

How will I ever be tranquil, except to physically hold in my hands a print-bound version of this dot com as evidence I can in fact produce more than a few paragraphs sequentially in a coherent manner?3

Writing in for writing or writing for artifacts

Scott Alexander writes a post up, and then it keeps existing somewhere in his head because he has good memory and can refer to it later, but mostly he allows other* *people* to sort out his posts and treat them as “artifacts”. (Same as Robin Hanson, see e.g. this LWer treating Overcoming Bias as an anthology of *artifacts.*) Gwern lives *deep within his world of artifacts: he reads papers, each of them non-fungible, links have a nearly tactical sensation to them for him; his website itself is an artifact of artifacts, his life a constant thrum of keeping it up to his standards. So naturally, he will not tolerate a mess, because tolerating a mess is to allow an artifact to fall: whereas Scott Alexander cares not, can even afford to dump his own website in favor for switching to Substack, because he holds little respect for the container of his own words.

This is why Astral Codex Ten links are unmemorizable Substack garbage and Gwern, though certainly far from perfect (there are so many obvious site redirects he could add in), at least has Schelling links set up for most of his pages.4

  1. Which, perhaps, is OK. They might ask, was it ever more than vanity? ↩

  2. And even one Croissanthology! You can just send people emails; you can just participate in linkposts by sending authors emails; Earth, and especially the internet within it (where you spend all your time anyway) is absurdly editable. ↩

  3. Seemingly, as you have just seen, I can write three ~coherent paragraphs fit with links and a steady-enough cadence, in one sitting. But am I proud of it? Well… it’s fundamentally meta work. And I would not consider myself a writer if I were to merely write about writing! As, alas, many so-called “writers” seem to do. Indeed, one reason Gwern.net is such a wonderful place is because the mind at the center of it is so vastly curious and infovorous about everything that even when writing is of equal interest, little of the text there ends up being about it. (You can still find plenty of meta on the site, like a discussion of the morning writing effect or in some sense his socks post.) Whereas in my case… It feels likely, as of this moment, that I will wake up tomorrow with little memory of writing this post, except as a vague tinge of embarrassment at having fallen for the temptation of meta. ↩

  4. I will note in the name of footnote 2 that as far as I can tell I am the only person to have coined “Schelling links” and that Gwern found it on Twitter. The world is editable. That’s at least two small dents in Gwern.net I find myself passively noting on this page. (This page is editable too! Speak to me at twitter.com/croissanthology!) ↩