Changelog

transcribed novella “Radiance”
transcribed & annotated the autobiographical essay Old Legends by Gregory Benford 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 (Berger1984, Analog)

Personal:

reviewed Umineko

Site:

signed up for MailChimp & started a monthly mailing list for Gwern.net updates
my Gratipay is up to $11.03^$7.35₂₀₁₃ a week. I thank all donators.

November 2013

Another busy month:

DNB meta-analysis: corrected multiple mistakes based on Redick’s review
Lunar cycle effect on sleep: split out, acquired 2 other Zeo users’ data, expanded into a multi-level model & power analysis (Cajochen still has not responded)
Modafinil: price table update
Silk Road:
- estimating DPR’s net fortune based on the FBI numbers
- Darknet market survival analysis
- publicly betting Sheep & BMR to shut down soon (which was vindicated even quicker than expected)
- Mike Power email interview
- BBC Radio 5 interview (not yet broadcast)
- doxed the owner of Sheep Marketplace (see https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9spTATw6 & /doc/darknet-market/sheep-marketplace/2013-11-03-sheepmarketplace-doxxing.maff)
Bitcoin:
- short essay on Zerocoin prospects
- bets: update on bet with qwertyoruiop ₿<$75.05^$50₂₀₁₃—conceded defeat, learned a lesson about panicking, and paid up; altogether admirable
Radiance: finished transcription & added all notations
AB testing: blockquote finished, status quo performed best
Site:
- anonymous feedback analysis
- deleted Flattr, trying out Gratipay for donations

My focus for October was coping with the fallout from the bust of Silk Road—dealing with the revelations, copying the SR forums, tracking down leads, talking to various people, recording the ensuing arrests, tracking the darknet markets popping up in its wake… I still have much material to work through, but some things I managed to do included:

Drugs 2.0: “Your Crack’s in the Post” (book chapter)
rescuing the vendor public profiles and using some in my page
betting all and sundry that BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep Marketplace will be busted or shut down within a year (no takers)
researching the digitalink” bust

I decided to post my most extensive self-experiment yet, on LSD microdosing. While there was a lot of criticism, I still regard it as worthwhile and setting a new benchmark for any future research in that area.

My anti-linkrot system benefited from comments on Hacker News telling me how to use archive.today; this may help me out quite a bit in the future.

A/B testing has been active since Hacker News traffic furnished large sample sizes:

foreground/background test: pure black/white was best
font size 100–120%: default 100% was best
blockquote formatting testing zebra striping: started but not yet finished

September 2013

compiled a small meta-analysis of creatine’s effect on intelligence
combined previous progress reports all into a single page (this page) & added it to the sidebar. Should help out everyone who keep asking for an RSS feed of major changes rather than every change.
started a new A/B test on foreground/background colors
expanded the Google Alerts over time analysis with fresh emails from the past half-year, for its Hacker News submission
started a bigger Noopept self-experiment
did some spaced repetition research using the Mnemosyne logs: found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance—with a clear circadian rhythm

August 2013

A/B testing: the line-height test found no difference, so I did a quick one where I tested an empty test to check the A/B testing tool I’m using; I successfully failed to reject the null. The next test is whether underlining hyperlinks annoys people or not.
Book reviews: I wrote a Haskell program to parse my GoodReads ratings & reviews into flat Pandoc Markdown; it works somewhat well, it seems to be eating blockquotes & neutering hyperlinks, I’m not sure why. Was also an opportunity to clean up some reviews: inline some of them, spellcheck, expand references & links, which was a lot of work. But it’s nice to have my reviews gathered somewhere with a readable interface. kiba thinks the work may pay for itself in affiliate revenue with Amazon, but I’m skeptical.
Scholz’s Radiance: Added a hundred pages or so. Annotating some of it is quite difficult; Scholz’s familiarity with Wagner’s operas is a challenge, since I’ve only ever read his Ring Cycle.
I’ve started two new self-experiments:
- Magnesium citrate on mood/productivity
- Treadmill desk usage on spaced repetition scores
Touhou music growth rate: made a little more progress on Touhou music, with an analysis # of releases vs time: seems like we may’ve reached peak Touhou in 2009_17ya.
Silk Road mirrors: I’ve started hosting public copies of subsets of the darknet markets; these are backups for particular incidents or timeseries
Spaced repetition statistics: I’ve been analyzing my Mnemosyne data and the giant public database for time of day effects. While my results aren’t conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time to study your flashcards seem to be noon. A little surprising, you’d think that late at night, before bedtime, would be the best time.
My forgotten cleaning methods like Sand polls aren’t done because I got a much lower rate of responses to the polls than I was hoping for and only got enough responses in the final poll the other day.

July 2013

Interesting things I wrote during July:

Google Alerts: Statistical analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful.
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
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…
Sand: continues to progress; I closed the LW poll and set up 3 new polls on Gwern.net to test problems with the original poll.
Betting Made a list of things I’ve bet on or at least tried to bet on with people (as opposed to prediction market use). Disappointingly short.
Scholz’s Radiance: I’ve started transcribing and annotating one of my favorite tech/lit novels. It’s mostly done.
Cicadas for dinner: I finally got around to eating the cicadas I caught during the most recent Maryland emergence; so of course I had to write up this outré dining.

Right now, I’m listening through my Reitaisai 10 downloads (more Touhou music work); and working with this coach who is interested in predicting triple-jump performance by college athletes, and has collected a bunch of data about triple-jumpers.

June 2013

Hm, what did I get done this June…

It was a little boring, honestly; jury duty was a mental distraction where I couldn’t plan to do anything but I ultimately wound up going in once and not being picked up for the jury! So I spent a lot of time simply digging up fulltext papers for citations, so at least there’s now something like another 100 papers available online for melatonin/nicotine/modafinil etc..

I was thinking of trying to meta-analyze the correlation of lithium in drinking-water with suicides/murders/mental-illness, but after I got copies of all the citations I knew of, I’m not sure the data is homogenous to do that, which is disappointing, and the meta-analysis papers/textbooks I’ve checked don’t seem to be very encouraging about the utility of doing it with epidemiology stuff.
And reorganizing & fixing broken links & updating various pages (I figured out how to make a fun forest plot showing the active/passive split in dual n-back studies)
My long-running font A/B test finished but with the most boring possible results of close to zero difference between the 4 fonts
I researched an old family friend in his 90s who has never been willing to talk about his government work during the Cold War and found some stuff using released Census records, but that’s not really of interest to other people, and I decided to not make it public. Likewise when I added ~40 book reviews from my old notes to my Goodreads account.
I managed to trace an arrested drug dealer back to his Silk Road account, which was somewhat interesting: Reddit discussion
Is one familiar with Fukuyama & ‘the end of history’? I think he’s right but no one seems to agree with me, so I wrote a short essay defending him Like most political essays, it’s probably worse than I realize.
From my perspective, probably the most interesting thing I wrote all month was some criticism of early SF, pointing out the obsolete science behind some stuff written off as fantasy.

May 2013

I’ve made a little more progress on the Touhou project
Added 2 new studies to the DNB meta-analysis and also a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: it doesn’t)
updated my analysis of SDr’s sleep data
oh wait, I did do a new project: applied survival analysis to modeling fiction reviews

And in my Google analysis (which I credit to last month and not May, even if it went viral in early May), I added in random survival forests, fixing that gap in evaluating prediction methods, which was a little burden of guilt off my mind.

While I was at it, I reproduced that recent paper analyzing Bitcoin exchange shutdown or theft risk. The dude’s since given me his source code. (What can I say? Survival analysis is a great hammer, and it cost me enough tears and sweat to learn how to use the R library that I plan to use it everywhere I can.)
I started a little Noopept self-experiment using the Noopept someone gave me, but unfortunately they gave me too little for the results to be very meaningful (see the power analysis); but maybe they will have a trend and I can try a bigger experiment later.
TruBrain sent me a month’s supply of their all-in-one nootropic, but I haven’t tried it yet because it would interfere with the Noopept. I also purchased magnesium l-threonate, which is a disappointment so far, and some nicotine patches, which I haven’t used yet. A small sample order from a new modafinil website selling the usual Indian Modalert is in progress but hasn’t arrived yet. (It ultimately did not arrive as the delivery required a signature.)
I have a weird little literature/historical/survey article in progress; we’ll see where that goes
I posted an analysis I wrote a few months ago in private of whether a particular vendor on Silk Road is a federal mole (probably not)

Actually, I guess it was overall a pretty productive month. Probably helped that jury duty has so far turned out to be a bust: I’ve been on call since 21 May but have yet to actually go into the courthouse to do anything.

2012–2013_13ya

Original

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.

Job 28:12 (KJV translation)

Here is material I’ve worked on in the 477 days since my last update. 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. (A later re-analysis revealed this result to be due to a flaw in the analysis; a better-done analysis revealed no particular improvement or damage to sleep.)
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_41ya)
The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules, Rossi1987 (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_24ya)
Otaku Talk”, Okada et al 2004
“Earth in My Window”, Murakami2005
“On The Battlefield of ‘Superflat’
Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive”, Sarrazin2010
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:

posted summaries of my personality & attitudes & my RSS feed collection

2011

Original

I’d like to poison your mind
With wrong ideas that appeal to you
Though I am not unkind…

“Whistling in the Dark, Flood, They Might Be Giants

Per my past practice of linking stuff I think LWers will find interesting, here is what I’ve been up to lately:

Politicians are Ethical: applying base-rate neglect
Modafinil: a dual-pronged argument for low-balling estimates of modafinil harm by pointing to both temporal and quality discounting of health in old age. (If you missed it the first time around, I still think my mini-tutorial on drug ordering with Bayes’s theorem is worth reading.)
The Narrowing Circle: argument that the usual belief of ‘moral progress’ and the ‘expanding circle’ assume many of their conclusions by pointing to the beliefs and classes of entities discarded along the way. (As many LWers share those assumptions and will be unsympathetic, the interesting parts may be the appendices on perpetuities and waqfs, inasmuch as those bear directly on cryonics.)
Both Modafinil and Spaced repetition have been expanded with scores more links to studies & PDFs. (Nicotine and Melatonin are next.)
Worldbuilding: The Lights in the Sky are Sacs is a silly bit of SF/alternate history speculation involving floating hydrogen-sac organisms.
Wikipedia and Knol has been completed, as the 7 predictions I made on the matter have been judged thanks to Google’s recent announcements; I blew one.
Stuff which is incomplete or which is just a pile of notes:
- Existential risks and mathematical error
- The morality of sperm donation (sketch of argument smart utilitarians should donate sperm)
- notes on intermittent fasting
I stuck a link in the footer of every page to a Google spreadsheet form, borrowing the idea from Luke Muehlhauser—I’ve only gotten 1 feedback so far, IIRC, but that was before I put it in the footer and updated all the pages a few hours ago. (As of 2015_11ya, there are hundreds of responses and I consider the feedback form to have paid its way; see my later writeup detailing the benefits.)

Backlinks

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Bibliography

[Bibliography of links/references used in page]