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Why to Not Write a Book

A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.

I don’t feel enthused about it; but to make a book I would not be ashamed of, I would have to spend many hours revising, rewriting, stripping out hypertext features and deciding what should stay, reformatting for some arcane publisher workflow like EPUB (or worse). I definitely won’t have time or energy to follow up on weird anomalies or interesting new rabbit-holes, and even if my output appears unaffected by The Book™, I am in reality eating my intellectual seed-corn and gradually falling out of date, as I neglect the ordinary work of reading & discussion that may flower years later. The long-form essayist/blogger Tim Urban of “Wait But Why”(WBW) made a name for himself in the mid-2010s by writing long enthusiastic essays, leavened with crude but effective comics, about various rabbit-hole topics like cryonics, the rise of deep learning, willpower/procrastination etc; at his peak he became a favored mouthpiece of Elon Musk.

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