I'm starting a new blog

hello world!

Welcome to my new blog! I’m planning to write long form posts about a wide variety of topics: obviously including serious topics like AI, but also many other random sidequests.

There are a few main reasons that I’m doing this:

I want to meet interesting people. My current way of doing this is meeting lots of people and then seeing how the vibes go. Unfortunately, this is not very scalable. Another way to find cool people is to put a bunch of writing out there, and then if someone likes the writing then that’s probably a sign that I’d get along with them. My papers have been great for surfacing people who are interested in similar research to me; so perhaps if I put more writing in the world on all of my thoughts then I’ll surface people who think similarly to me outside of research as well.

I want to get better at thinking. I find that writing is a really good forcing function for making my ideas more well-formed. Although I rarely form new ideas while writing—that usually happens in intense conversations, or during long solitary walks—I often find that putting ideas onto (digital) paper forces me to consolidate and clarify my ideas in a way that helps me think better.

I want to do more cool stuff. Writing papers motivates me to do cool research, so maybe writing a blog about non-research things will motivate me to do cool non-research things. A blog writeup makes for a nice final product to aim for.

I want to change the world. My day job is to try and make AI go well through technical research. One way to make this happen is to diffuse good ideas into the world. I do a bunch of this via writing papers, but that’s very slow, and it’s only one of many ways to interact with the world. A blog is a different way to put ideas out into the world.

The first post will be up tomorrow. See you then!

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P.S: The name “nabla theta” is a placeholder, borrowed from my twitter handle. While temporary names have a strange habit of becoming permanent, I’m hopeful that I’ll find a better name for this blog at some point, especially once I have more posts out and a particular vibe develops organically. Let me know if you have any suggestions!