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Recent updates to gwern.net (2013-2014)
“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:
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Recent updates to gwern.net (2012-2013)
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
- 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.netusing 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
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