Previous: Recent updates to gwern.net (2011)

“But where shall wisdom be found? / And where is the place of understanding? / Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living…for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”

As before, here is material I’ve worked on in the 477 days since my last update which LWers may find interesting. In roughly chronological & topical order, here are the major additions to gwern.net:

• I interviewed translator Michael House about his work in Japan as a translator
• finished data collection for my hafu anime statistics page and begun analysis. (I’ve achieved good coverage of characters, found an astonishingly consistent absence of Korean characters, and confirmed the blond-haired/blue-eyed stereotype; but my original thesis doesn’t seem to work and the data is too unevenly distributed to identify time trends.)
• judged the 2011 & 2012 results for the Haskell Summer of Codes and the accuracy of my predictions
• did a meta-analysis on whether dual n-back increases IQ, and examining possible biases and various claims about what makes the training work or not work
• did another meta-analysis on whether iodine increases IQ, etc

• modafinil:

  • checked for subjective effects of blinded modafinil
  • updated my modafinil price-chart twice, and expanded with brand data and a new armodafinil table
  • researched modafinil-related prosecutions & convictions in the USA
  • and any connection with schizophrenia
• tried kratom
• did a nicotine gum/n-back experiment
• did 2 potassium experiments; neither improved my mood/productivity, and one damaged my sleep
• my Silk Road page has been expanded with a BBC interview, putting SR in a historical cypherpunk context, an updated account of all arrests & law enforcement actions, and application of basic statistics to ordering
• ran 2 sleep experiments on the timing of taking a vitamin D supplement: I found that taking vitamin D before bed substantially damaged my sleep, while taking vitamin D after waking up did not hurt & somewhat helped
• checked whether a walking desk (treadmill) damaged typing speed or accuracy
• I have run 3 Wikipedia experiments establishing that: Talk page edits are ignored by editors; random link deletions (and their restoration) are also ignored by editors; and external link suggestions on Talk pages are also ignored by readers. (I take the former 2 as indicative of the decline in edit activity and rise of deletionist beliefs on Wikipedia.)
• tried some economic/historical analysis: “Reasons of State: Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland to the USA?”
• Defending sunk costs essay (LW discussion)
• “Slowing Moore’s Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It”
• “The Hyperbolic Time Chamber as Brain Emulation Analogy”
• tried estimating the bandwidth of a Death Note
• compiled predictions for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• looked into Conscientiousness and online education; studies so far are useless from a meta-analytic standpoint
• tripled length of appendix dealing with the reliability of mainstream science (methodological flaws, replication rates, etc)
• finished meta-ethics essay, “The Narrowing Circle”
• explained the philosophy saying “one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”
• speculation about a restoration of the British monarchy
• clean up & exploratory data analysis of SDr’s lucid dreaming data
• Who wrote the Death Note script? (LW discussion)
• 2012 US election predictions: statistical comparison

• Comment anchoring experiment (LW discussion)

• Turing-completeness in surprising places (inventory of particularly “weird machines”; relevant to computer and AI security)

Transcribed or translated:

• Nash’s letters on cryptography
• Douglas Hofstadter’s superrationality columns (from Metamagical Themas, 1985)
• “The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules”, Rossi 1987 (lessons from the large RCTs evaluating social & welfare interventions)
• “The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search”, Falk et al 1994
• Gene Wolfe on writing
• “Shiny balls of Mud: William Gibson Looks at Japanese Pursuits of Perfection” (2002)
• “Otaku Talk”, Okada et al 2004
• “Earth in My Window”, Murakami 2005
• “On The Battlefield of ‘Superflat’”
• “Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive”, Sarrazin 2010
• 1996 NewType interview with Hideaki Anno (translated by me, with the help of an EGFer)
• 1997 Animeland interview with Hideaki Anno (bought, transcribed, and translated by me with the help of other LWers)
• 1997 Utena interviews

More technical:

• added edit history statistics/visualization for gwern.net using GitStats
• site traffic updates: July-December 2011, January 2012-July 2012, July 2012-Jan 2013
• There’s also been a lot of backend changes: switching to Amazon S3+Cloudflare, adding error pages, metadata like tags, A/B testing, but no need to go into detail.

Personal:

• dumped my notes on my 2011 visit to San Francisco
• posted summaries of my personality & attitudes & my RSS feed collection
• enjoyed some mead; I still like tea better, though
• dumped notes on the 2012 SF convention ICON