Recent updates to gwern.net (2013-2014)

gwern

Previous: 2011, 2012-2013

“It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. / It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, nor the sapphire. / The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for vessels of fine gold. / No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”

Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to gwern.net:

Statistics:

Google Alerts: analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful.
Google shutdowns: compiled dataset of past & present Google products for a survival analysis attempting to investigate common claims about why Google abandons things & predict which would be shutdown in the next 5 years. So far the model’s predictions are doing well.
applied survival analysis to modeling Methods of Rationality reviews on FF.net
reproduced a paper analyzing Bitcoin exchange shutdown or theft risk.
Public release of the Mnemosyne spaced repetition dataset (18GB of 121.2m flashcard reviews, collected ~2004-2014)
nootropics survey analysis
power simulation of the penalty from omitting important covariates in logistic regression
did some spaced repetition research using the Mnemosyne logs: found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance - with a clear circadian rhythm; while my results aren’t conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time for recalling your flashcards seem to be noon. (I haven’t looked at time correlates with next review, though.)

QS:

DNB meta-analysis expanded with a dozen or so studies & a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: it doesn’t)
compiled a small meta-analysis of creatine’s effect on intelligence
updated my analysis of SDr’s sleep data
2013 Lewis meditation quasi-experiment: A Quantified Selfer and a few other guys did some meditation while doing an arithmetic game; turned out to be a perfect application for multilevel modeling
Modafinil: price table update
Sleep and lunar phases: A recent paper claimed that there’s a phase-of-the-moon effect on circadian rhythms; since I have so much sleep data on myself, I thought I’d see if there’s any effect…
analyzed a self-experiment about low level laser therapy improving reaction time
Treadmill/spaced repetition experiment (likely interference)
an LSD microdosing self-experiment (while there was a lot of criticism, I still regard as worthwhile and setting a new benchmark for any future research in that area.)
finished caffeine-pill wakeup pilot trial, began full-scale blinded self-experiment

Black-markets:

an analysis of whether a particular vendor on Silk Road is a federal mole (probably not, but some have claimed he was the source of the bad fake IDs Ross Ulbricht ordered)
transcribed Drugs 2.0: “Your Crack’s in the Post” (book chapter)
betting all and sundry that BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep Marketplace will be busted or shut down within a year (no takers; my 1-year predictions were correct, but my 6-month predictions drastically underestimated the risk)
preliminary black market survival analysis, done for the bet
compiled a table of all known black-markets with lifetimes (intended for a larger survival analysis)
estimating DPR’s net fortune based on the FBI numbers
doxed the owner of Sheep Marketplace (see http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9spTATw6 & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2013-11-03-sheepmarketplace-doxxing.maff )
BBC Radio 5 & NHK interviews
2 Mike Power interviews
I have begun systematically spidering all operational black-markets, and wrote a bit on how my complacency about free-market mechanisms lead to no serious archiving early on

Bitcoin:

Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto emails
McCaleb email interview on MtGox
short essay on Zerocoin prospects
bets: update on bet with qwertyoruiop btc<$50 - conceded defeat, learned a lesson about panicking, and paid up; altogether admirable
wrote up an essay on:
- 3 attempts to blackmail/extort/scam
- a fanfiction about Satoshi Nakamoto sent to me by an anonymous user, which was too good to simply delete
- Evolution’s attempted blackmail of me to find out who was criticizing them on Reddit

Tech:

Spatial locality for better file compression
Epigrams on technology
Haskell Summer of Code: 2013 review

Literature/fiction

Scholz’s Radiance: transcribed, annotated, commentary, copy of original novella & diff with corresponding material in the final novel, and Benford essay “Old Legends” on his physics career, SF & science, the “Star Wars” program, Edward Teller, etc; tracked down and scanned a copy of “The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project’s Confrontation with Science Fiction”
Book reviews: for the LW media threads, I began writing book reviews on GoodReads, but why let them keep my reviews? So I wrote a Haskell program to parse my GoodReads ratings & reviews into Pandoc Markdown and make my own backup.
Sand, on:
- forgotten cleaning methods in literature; and
- the forgotten science behind early SF’s “great pain of space”
compiled & expanded anthology of my poems

Misc:

wrote a short essay defending Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis
Cicadas for dinner: I caught some cicadas during the most recent Maryland emergence; I review the spaghetti dinner I made with them
compiled my tea reviews
I researched an old family friend in his 90s who has never been willing to talk about his government work during the Cold War & found some stuff using released Census records; he has since passed away.

Site:

I began A/B testing my site design to try to improve readability:
- no difference between 4 fonts
- no difference between lineheights
- no difference between the null hypothesis & the null hypothesis
- a pure black/white foreground/background performed better than mixes of off-colors
- font size 100-120%: default of 100% was best
- blockquote formatting: Readability-style bad, zebra-stripes good
- header capitalization: best result was to upcase title & all section headers
- tested font size & number size & table of contents background: status quo of all was best
- BeeLine Reader: no color variant performed better than no-highlighting
anonymous feedback analysis (feedback turned out to be useful)
deleted Flattr, trying out Gittip for donations; Gittip turns out to work much better
I began a newsletter/mailing-list; the back-issues are online:

Previous: 2011, 2012-2013

Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to gwern.net:

Statistics:

Google Alerts: analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful.
Google shutdowns: compiled dataset of past & present Google products for a survival analysis attempting to investigate common claims about why Google abandons things & predict which would be shutdown in the next 5 years. So far the model’s predictions are doing well.
applied survival analysis to modeling Methods of Rationality reviews on FF.net
reproduced a paper analyzing Bitcoin exchange shutdown or theft risk.
Public release of the Mnemosyne spaced repetition dataset (18GB of 121.2m flashcard reviews, collected ~2004-2014)
nootropics survey analysis
power simulation of the penalty from omitting important covariates in logistic regression
did some spaced repetition research using the Mnemosyne logs: found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance - with a clear circadian rhythm; while my results aren’t conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time for recalling your flashcards seem to be noon. (I haven’t looked at time correlates with next review, though.)

QS:

DNB meta-analysis expanded with a dozen or so studies & a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: it doesn’t)
compiled a small meta-analysis of creatine’s effect on intelligence
updated my analysis of SDr’s sleep data
2013 Lewis meditation quasi-experiment: A Quantified Selfer and a few other guys did some meditation while doing an arithmetic game; turned out to be a perfect application for multilevel modeling
Modafinil: price table update
Sleep and lunar phases: A recent paper claimed that there’s a phase-of-the-moon effect on circadian rhythms; since I have so much sleep data on myself, I thought I’d see if there’s any effect…
analyzed a self-experiment about low level laser therapy improving reaction time
Treadmill/spaced repetition experiment (likely interference)
an LSD microdosing self-experiment (while there was a lot of criticism, I still regard as worthwhile and setting a new benchmark for any future research in that area.)
finished caffeine-pill wakeup pilot trial, began full-scale blinded self-experiment

Black-markets:

an analysis of whether a particular vendor on Silk Road is a federal mole (probably not, but some have claimed he was the source of the bad fake IDs Ross Ulbricht ordered)
transcribed Drugs 2.0: “Your Crack’s in the Post” (book chapter)
betting all and sundry that BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep Marketplace will be busted or shut down within a year (no takers; my 1-year predictions were correct, but my 6-month predictions drastically underestimated the risk)
preliminary black market survival analysis, done for the bet
compiled a table of all known black-markets with lifetimes (intended for a larger survival analysis)
estimating DPR’s net fortune based on the FBI numbers
doxed the owner of Sheep Marketplace (see http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9spTATw6 & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2013-11-03-sheepmarketplace-doxxing.maff )
BBC Radio 5 & NHK interviews
2 Mike Power interviews
I have begun systematically spidering all operational black-markets, and wrote a bit on how my complacency about free-market mechanisms lead to no serious archiving early on

Bitcoin:

Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto emails
McCaleb email interview on MtGox
short essay on Zerocoin prospects
bets: update on bet with qwertyoruiop btc<$50 - conceded defeat, learned a lesson about panicking, and paid up; altogether admirable
wrote up an essay on:
- 3 attempts to blackmail/extort/scam
- a fanfiction about Satoshi Nakamoto sent to me by an anonymous user, which was too good to simply delete
- Evolution’s attempted blackmail of me to find out who was criticizing them on Reddit

Tech:

Spatial locality for better file compression
Epigrams on technology
Haskell Summer of Code: 2013 review

Literature/fiction

Scholz’s Radiance: transcribed, annotated, commentary, copy of original novella & diff with corresponding material in the final novel, and Benford essay “Old Legends” on his physics career, SF & science, the “Star Wars” program, Edward Teller, etc; tracked down and scanned a copy of “The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project’s Confrontation with Science Fiction”
Book reviews: for the LW media threads, I began writing book reviews on GoodReads, but why let them keep my reviews? So I wrote a Haskell program to parse my GoodReads ratings & reviews into Pandoc Markdown and make my own backup.
Sand, on:
- forgotten cleaning methods in literature; and
- the forgotten science behind early SF’s “great pain of space”
compiled & expanded anthology of my poems

Misc:

wrote a short essay defending Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis
Cicadas for dinner: I caught some cicadas during the most recent Maryland emergence; I review the spaghetti dinner I made with them
compiled my tea reviews
I researched an old family friend in his 90s who has never been willing to talk about his government work during the Cold War & found some stuff using released Census records; he has since passed away.

Site:

I began A/B testing my site design to try to improve readability:
- no difference between 4 fonts
- no difference between lineheights
- no difference between the null hypothesis & the null hypothesis
- a pure black/white foreground/background performed better than mixes of off-colors
- font size 100-120%: default of 100% was best
- blockquote formatting: Readability-style bad, zebra-stripes good
- header capitalization: best result was to upcase title & all section headers
- tested font size & number size & table of contents background: status quo of all was best
- BeeLine Reader: no color variant performed better than no-highlighting
anonymous feedback analysis (feedback turned out to be useful)
deleted Flattr, trying out Gittip for donations; Gittip turns out to work much better
I began a newsletter/mailing-list; the back-issues are online:

With regards to your nootropics and evolution article, something to note is that we in fact do appear to have a system for regulating dopamine up when sleep deprived (dopamine is imitated by drugs such as amphetamines), to keep us going. That's a system that wouldn't be specific to sleep deprivation if there weren't strong negative side effects.

Ultimately when you have a complex analog circuit network with feedback loops and gain, it ought to be pretty obvious what may be the negative side effects from amping up the gain (Runaway positive feedback. There's some exciting new research in computational neuroscience on this).

With regards to your nootropics and evolution article, something to note is that we in fact do appear to have a system for regulating dopamine up when sleep deprived (dopamine is imitated by drugs such as amphetamines), to keep us going.

We do? As far as I've ever seen, sleep homeostatic pressure is pretty relentless, there is no off switch for it. As far as I know, modafinil's mechanism hasn't been pinned down, but modafinil's dopamine effects (while much touted in the media as indicating risk of addiction despite the abundant real world evidence against addiction being a substantial risk) don't seem to be large and some of the followup research was weak.

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Recent updates to gwern.net (2013-2014)

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Recent updates to gwern.net (2013-2014)

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