Recent updates to gwern.net (2014-2015)

post by gwern · 2015-11-02T00:06:11.241Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 3 comments

Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014

“Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. / For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.”

Sorted by topic:

Darknet market related:

• Darknet Market archives, 2011-2015: 1.5tb of mirrors of scores of Tor-Bitcoin black-markets & forums 2013-2015, and other material; this is the single largest public archive of all DNM materials, and creating it was a major focus of mine since December 2013. The release also marks the end of my career as DNM expert - I’ve lost interest in the topic due to the apparent stability of the DNMs & being trapped in a local equilibrium
• DNM arrests compilation: a census of all known arrests Jan 2011-June 2015
• “Silk Goxed: How DPR used MtGox for hedging & lost big”
• there was an ICE subpoena on my Reddit account

Statistics & decision theory:

• When Does The Mail Come? A subjective Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times
• resorter tool for statistically re-ranking a set of ratings
• analysis of Effective Altruists’ donations as reported in the LW survey
• anthology on how “everything is correlated”
• electric vs stove kettle boiling-time analysis: collected some simple data on my kettles & demonstrated some statistics tools on the dataset like a Bayesian measurement-error model
• dysgenics power analysis: how much genetic data would it take to falsify those claims?
• noisy polls: modeling potentially falsified poll data
• Value of Information for suicide (example cost-benefit analysis of weakly predicting suicide)
• Air conditioner upgrade cost-benefit analysis
• probability/gerontology problem: can one visit 566 centenarians before any die? No.
• do causal networks explain why correlation≠causation is so often true?
• a little example of estimating scores from censored data

QS related:

• 2015 modafinil community survey (not quite finished)
• Bitter Melon experimental & cost-benefit analysis
• Redshift self-experiment: screen-reddening software shifts bedtime forward by 20 minutes
• magnesium citrate experiment finished: initial benefits but apparent cumulative overdose led to net negative effect and mixed effects on sleep
• playing with inferring Bayesian networks for my Zeo & body weight data (powerful generalization of SEMs, but requires a lot of data before networks stabilize)
• Nootropics: initial results on LLLT correlated with large increases; but the followup randomized experiment showed zero effect
• LLLT re-analysis: no change in sleep as hypothesized by another LLLT user
• analysis of sceaduwe’s spirulina/allergies self-experiment (no reduction in allergies)
• Noopept experiment (no benefits)
• Treadmill spaced repetition experiment: expanded analysis to cover treadmill’s impact on successive reviews with SEM (no additional damage to recall beyond that implied by the original damage)
• lithium orotate experiment finished: no effects positive or negative

• sleep correlations:

  • alcohol: no harm
  • optimal bedtime: a little earlier than usual
  • optimal wakeup time: a little earlier than usual

Tech:

• “Effective Use of arbtt”: My window tracker/time-logger of choice is arbtt which records X window info for later classification and analysis; but one of the challenges is you don’t know how to set up arbtt or improve your environment or write classifications rules. So I wrote a tutorial.
• Time-lock crypto: wrote a Bash implementation of serial hashing time-lock crypto, link to all known implementations of hash time-lock crypto; discuss recent major theoretical breakthroughs involving Bitcoin

Debunking:

• Bicycle face
• “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
• did Fifty Shades of Gray have only 4k readers as the original Twilight fanfiction?

gwern.net-related:

• switched to Patreon for donations
• continued sending out my newsletter; up to 24 issues now
• rewrote gwern.net CSS to be mobile-friendly; should now be readable in an iPhone 6 browser
• optimized website loading (removed Custom Search Engine, A/B testing, non-validating XML, outbound link-tracking; simplified Disqus; minified JS, and fully async/deferred JS loading)

• A/B testing:

  • proposal towards recurrent neural network for reinforcement learning of CSS
  • metadata test: indicates moving it from the sidebar to the top of page works as well
  • indentation test: no real result, defaulted to 2em
  • floating footnotes test: verified no apparent harm (as hoped)
  • paragraph indentation test (responding to anonymous complaint; they were wrong)

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