Comment by awanderingmind

I've never really experienced that from his writing, and I am definitely not an Ayn Rand fan. I'm also pretty sure he's not interested in creating a movement that could have 'adherents'... I suppose I could be wrong on that. But on the contrary, I find his writing to be often quite life-affirming - he seems to delight in deep focus on various interesting topics.

The worst I can say is that I find his predictions around AI (i.e. the scaling laws) to be concerning.

edit: having now read the linked interview, I can provide a clearly non-misanthropic quote, in response to the interviewer asking gwern what kind of role he hopes to play in people's lives:

  I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”