Recent updates to gwern.net (2014-2015)

[gwern]

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)

[Jayson_Virissimo]

Did you do anything clever to demonstrate that the survey award recipient was really chosen randomly?

[gwern]

No; I did think about it for a while since I would’ve liked to have an excuse for more hash precommitments and whatnot, but I couldn’t think of any meaningful way to do it without harming participation.

You can use the Bitcoin blockchain for verifiable randomness, but there’s no way to prove I didn’t edit or sort the survey results to put a sock puppet account in it. I could release a signed copy of the survey data and commit to a blockchain hash for choice, but then I would have had to release the Bitcoin addresses & emails (because otherwise it’s not verifiable in any way), which would damage people’s privacy; if I had banned email addresses so as to make it safe to release the full survey data so payments to Bitcoin addresses could be verified, then few people would have been able to benefit from the contest—because as I expected, only like 10% of respondents put in a Bitcoin address rather than an email address. And so on.

[27chaos]

I’m really really liking the everything correlates with everything observation.