Recent updates to gwern.net (2012-2013)

Nthing the "you are an inspiration" sentiment expressed here. This has reminded me that you should 'always be shipping'; always be doing stuff and making stuff.

What's your working environment like? You mention doing work for SI; is that at their offices or at home? I've been flirting with the idea of working part-time to pursue other projects in my spare time but I'm not sure I could hack being in a home office all day.

(And, if you don't mind me asking, how do you bankroll all this? Do you have a 'day job' per se?)

(One could argue that these questions should probably be ignored and not investigated in depth - to paraphrase Teller, often magic is simply putting in more effort than any sane person would - but nevertheless, this is how things work for me.)

I can't find a source for this quote (and if it's from a longer interview, I think I'd probably like to read it), possibly because I'm not picking the right words to Google. Do you have a citation?

I highly recommend just keeping a diary of the correct size with an appropriately sized pen with you at all times. A Moleskine with a pen in it has served me well not that they're tools handed down from Heaven or anything. Whether they're emotioins, thoughts or passing fancies, writing has helped me. More emotional shit than anything else. I don't (re)read it much but just writing is an excellent way of getting self-awareness when it comes to emotions. Saying them would likley work near as well but writing is a great deal easier.

I don't know how to do that. There's no automated way to tell when I've added something important and when I just made a lot of minor changes like adding additional citations or formatting tweaks. When something is 'finished' is knowable only in retrospect.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

There's another assumption I didn't realize I was making: you don't change future questions based on what answers you get. But here goes: If every question is dependent only on the colors of the grenades, and you have 4 questions, then if you draw out a grid like this:

Then each square represents a set of four answers, one for each of questions Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. The column decides the answers to Q1 and Q2. The row decides the aswers to Q3 and Q4. I'm using "1" for "yes" and "2" for "no." The columns and rows are numberd in grey code, which means that moving one square in any direction is equivalent to flipping one Y/N answer. Because there are 4 answers to flip, and 4 directions to move in (you can move left on the leftmost square to end up on the rightmost, same with top and bottom. Like the "Asteroids" video game), every answer-flip is represented by a move of one square in a particular direction.

So for each possible grenade color, answering the questions truthfully would specify a square in the grid. Answering one incorrectly will move the set of answers one square in one direction. So if when the grenade is really red, the true answers are 0101 (No to Q1, yes to Q2, no to Q3, yes to Q4), the sets of answers the person can give are the ones filled in below:

The light red one is if they don't lie, and the dark red ones are if they ile once. To make it so we can always determine the ball color, we have to arrange 3 of these shapes on the grid so that they don't overlap. If they do overlap, then they could have answered that way if the ball was one of two or more different colors.

Because this grid wraps like the asteroids game, it doesn't matter where you put the first "+". Mentally placing a second plus makes it obvious that there is nowhere to put the last , no matter where you put it.

But, if they have to lie, then the answers they can give look like this:

And you can fit 4 of this shape on the grid:

So to determine the grenade color if 4 colors are possible in 4 questions, if in 4 questions they must lie, just pick the questions so that if the grenade is red, the correct answers are 0101, if blue, 1101, if green, 1010, if pink, 0010. This means Q1 should be "Is the ball blue or green," Q2 should be "Is it red or blue," Q3: "Is it green or pink", Q4: "is it red or blue" (Yes, the last three are basically the same.)

When you get your answers, look up a square in the grid, and whatever color it is, is the color of the ball.

In the form of speed-reading in which I was trained, you write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph as you're reading, and after you read a chapter or section, you review each of your one-sentence summaries. In theory this allows you to "process" things like textbooks into knowledge stored in your brain very quickly. In practice, speed reading only works for me if the material doesn't contain any concepts that I don't already understand.

I find it very useful when I need to get the gist of a paper to decide whether I want to actually read it in detail.

I think it is. As I mention in my footnote, it's been a long time since I was reading up on the topic and I don't have any notes, but I recall the gist being that it's at the upper levels that you forfeit comprehension and that for lower speeds like <400wpm on nontechnical material you may even get better comprehension.