Gwern's essays, sorted by importance
Gwern marks many of his posts with an importance score, but doesn’t provide a sorted index. This is that index. It updates every week.
Currently, 418 pages have an importance rating. Pages within each score are ordered newest first by creation date.
10 13 pages
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I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.
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Speculative proposal to create artificial neural nets with human-like performance by high-learning-rate/regularization training of overparameterized NNs to trigger catapulting/grokking. Over-parameterization as a route to true generalization would resolve many outstanding mysteries of artificial versus natural intelligence.
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On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
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Preliminary draft notes towards a cost-benefit analysis of CRISPR-based editing for complex human traits with 2015–2016 SOTAs; obsolete.
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A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art.
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Attempts at considering the profitability of life-extension interventions for healthy adults
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Compilation of studies comparing observational results with randomized experimental results on the same intervention, compiled from medicine/economics/psychology, indicating that a large fraction of the time (although probably not a majority) correlation ≠ causality.
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Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
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Critics of AI risk suggest diminishing returns to computing (formalized asymptotically) means AI will be weak; this argument relies on a large number of questionable premises and ignoring additional resources, constant factors, and nonlinear returns to small intelligence advantages, and is highly unlikely.
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Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
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3 essays by AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter exploring cooperation/game theory/‘superrationality’ in the context of the failure of political coordination to prevent global nuclear war (published 1985, from Scientific American).
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Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom's heuristics, nootropics
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MAD will not work in outer space; pre-emptive strikes are nigh-guaranteed.
9 23 pages
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Revisiting GPT-3 and my ‘Scaling Hypothesis’ 2 years: it holds up and scaling has been too successful to be strangled in th ecrub. I speculate about the immediate future of scaling for 2023–2024 and beyond.
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Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
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Bibliography of ML scaling papers showing smooth scaling of neural net performance in general with increasingly large parameters, data, & compute.
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AIs limited to pure computation (Tool AIs) supporting humans, will be less intelligent, efficient, and economically valuable than more autonomous reinforcement-learning AIs (Agent AIs) who act on their own and meta-learn, because all problems are reinforcement-learning problems.
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2015 survey of online modafinil users asking about dosages, consumption patterns, ratings, purchases, and demographics
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Mirrors of ~89 Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets & forums 2011–2015, and related material.
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On desirable correlates of intelligence
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Problems with social experiments and evaluating them, loopholes, causes, and suggestions; non-experimental methods systematically deliver false results, as most interventions fail or have small effects.
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A time dilation chamber as thought experiment on the power of pure thought, with comparison to computer AGI advantages/disadvantages.
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Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.
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Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.
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Shrinking marginal returns to science and technology
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Human and animal sunk costs often aren't, and sunk cost bias may be useful on an individual level to encourage learning. Convincing examples of sunk cost bias typically operate on organizational levels and are probably driven by non-psychological causes like competition.
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Break down survival as Drake equation, see how plastination differs from cryonics, try to calculate advantage
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History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
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On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Lithium is a well-known mood stabilizer & suicide preventive; some research suggests lithium may be a cognitively-protective nutrient and at the population level, chronic lithium consumption (through drinking water) predicts lower levels of mental illness, violence, & suicide.
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What are the true limits to motivation?
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Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it's good for.
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Effects, health concerns, suppliers, prices & rational ordering.
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Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
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My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
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Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
8 26 pages
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Training new LLMs on old LLM outputs is a good way to get a lot more data and recycle compute, and is not paradoxically self-defeating nor necessarily harmful.
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Meta-mathematics discussion of why math is open-ended and generalizes, from the perspective of meta-reinforcement learning and contrasted with fields like speedrunning: it culturally selects for feasibly finding reusable findings about short general Turing machines.
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Speculation about what sort of ordinary human writing is most relevant and useful to future AI systems.
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Dwarkesh Patel interviews Gwern Branwen about anonymity, AI scaling, AGI timelines, and the path from Wikipedia editing to Gwern.net. The interview becomes an intellectual autobiography: scaling as the triumph of compute over elegance, writing as LLM-era self-preservation, and rabbit holes as method. It also covers hearing impairment, Borges, site design, funding, GLP drugs, psychedelics, and open questions.
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Creative writing by OpenAI's GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
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Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless. What makes a good criticism is the chance of being a 'difference which makes a difference' to our ultimate actions.
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Decision-theoretic analysis of how to optimally play the Haghani & Dewey 2016 300-round double-or-nothing coin-flipping game with an edge and ceiling better than using the Kelly Criterion. Computing and following an exact decision tree increases earnings by $6.6 over a modified KC.
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Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of the effect of fancier packaging on subscription cancellations & optimal experiment design.
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Scripts for convenient free secure Bitcoin-based dating of large numbers of files/strings
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Teaching a text-generating char-RNN to automatically imitate many different authors by labeling the input text by author; additional experiments include imitating Geocities and retraining GPT-2 on a large Project Gutenberg poetry corpus.
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Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times: modeling deliveries as survival analysis, model comparison, optimizing check times with a loss function, and optimal data collection.
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E-book edition of the 2002 Carter Scholz novel of post-Cold War science/technology, extensively annotated with references and related texts.
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Rain or shine affect my mood? Not much.
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Technology-driven shift in demand for Conscientiousness, not intelligence
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Is sperm donating a worthwhile form of positive eugenics?
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Modern ethics excludes as many beings as it includes.
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Tricking the body into living longer?
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Simple cost-benefit: distributed computing considered harmful as scientific lemon projects run at high resource cost.
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2011 essay on how Bitcoin's long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the 'Worse is Better' paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
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How do you encrypt a file such that it can be decrypted after a date, but not before? Use serial computations for proof-of-work using successive squaring, chained hashes, or witness encryption on blockchains.
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Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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EEG recordings of sleep and my experiments with things affecting sleep quality or durations: melatonin, potassium, vitamin D etc.
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2013 discussion of how systemic biases in science, particularly medicine and psychology, have resulted in a research literature filled with false positives and exaggerated effects, called 'the Replication Crisis'.
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More effective ways to kill = terrorists are stupid, or killing not most important thing to them
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Terrorists act irrationally from a rational activism perspective, and groups act in ways most consistent with terrorism being about social status and belonging
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Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
7 38 pages
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Research proposal for measuring how coding LLM perplexity scales with codebase context size, using Lean as a test case for whether formal languages have better predictability exponents and could lead to safer, more secure software worldwide.
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Proposal to use SAEs to crack open the dark matter of LLM inference about text.
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Proposal to teach LLM efficient interviewing by using psychometric tests to construct optimal question-and-answer sequences to train on. Would enable better personalization and imitation, and eventually, uploading.
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Discussion of possible tasks to measure LLM capabilities in soft 'creative' tasks like brainstorming or editing, to quantify failures in creative writing domains.
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Transcript of famous & widely-quoted 1986-03-07 lecture by Turing-Award mathematician Richard Hamming about how to do scientific research & development based on his life, antecedents of eminence, people he knew, the growing use of computers in science, navigating bureaucracy, maintaining creativity, and running Bell Labs.
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Many fashions and artworks originate as copies of practical objects. Why? Because any form of optimized design is intrinsically esthetically-pleasing, and a great starting point.
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Nonfiction writing by OpenAI's GPT-3 model, testing logic, commonsense reasoning, anagrams, PDF/OCR cleaning, creative nonfiction, etc.
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Tryon’s Rat Experiment is a multi-decade selective breeding animal experiment begin in the 1930s which rapidly bred enormous differences in a complex psychological trait, maze-running, demonstrating core principles of behavior genetics.
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Experiments with OpenAI's 'preference learning' approach, which trains a NN to predict global quality of datapoints, and then uses reinforcement learning to optimize that directly, rather than proxies. I am unable to improve quality, perhaps due to too-few ratings.
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Demonstration tutorial of retraining OpenAI's GPT-2 (a text-generating Transformer neural network) on large poetry corpuses to generate high-quality English verse.
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Links on traumatic brain injuries and mortality/morbidity from falling; do we greatly underestimate how many problems are caused by head injuries and how many QALYs are lost to falling?
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Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase's theory of the firm/linear optimization/DRL/evolution/multicellular life/pain/Internet communities as multi-level optimization problems.
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Simple demonstrations of the AI control problem using MCTS in a Gridworld
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Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
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Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as 'null hypothesis testing'.
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Witticisms, parodies, pointed observations, japeries and/or jocularities, Tom Swifties, nominative determinism, and discursive drollery
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Survival analysis of lifespans, deaths, and predictive factors of Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets
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May 2013 overview of Silk Road 1's rise, powered by Tor & Bitcoin, enabling safe and easy online drug sales through the mail.
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Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns
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Does music impede studying and thinking?
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A census database of all publicly-reported arrests and prosecutions connected to the Tor-Bitcoin drug darknet markets 2011–2015, and analysis of mistakes.
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Self-experiment on whether screen-tinting software such as Redshift/f.lux affect sleep times and sleep quality; Redshift lets me sleep earlier but doesn't improve sleep quality.
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Weak points in the networks powering technological progress: chip factories
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Self-experiment on vitamin D effects on sleep: harmful taken at night, no or beneficial effects when taken in the morning.
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Does early interest in science fiction predicts future scientific careers or accomplishments?
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Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note and considering fixes
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Cookie prices & tax filings as evidence of corporate inefficiency
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Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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How I reinvented longevity insurance, which provides payouts if one lives to a certain point and thus might run out of savings.
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Thoughts on uses and a categorization of said uses for lifelogging
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Examples of low-hanging fruit suggesting the education system does not solely optimize for learning
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Aesthetically & economically, maybe there is too much new art. Don't take this too seriously.
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A compendium of DNB, WM, IQ information up to 2015.
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Network effects & benefits of gritting one's teeth & submitting to a Wikipedia's rules, rather than using Wikia or one's own site.
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CMU game connected to error coding theory
6 33 pages
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Interview with Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History) on writing and where ideas come from; done November 2025 at the Inkhaven writing residency.
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Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
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The moral application of copyright and intellectual property to AI is the minimum protection necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
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Proposal for a personal wiki built on neural nets: all edits are logged & used to finetune a NN assistant in realtime.
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Proposal for a general NN architecture handling arbitrary tasks, for scaling up MLPs, with applications.
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A side effect of preference-learning approaches like RLHF is a severe loss of 'diversity' or 'creativity' in outputs, analogous to broader mode collapse in generative models.
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Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with coaching or deliberate practice.
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Links on the circularity and mimetic desire basis of fashions in consumer goods, ideologies, politics, organizations like academia, religion etc.
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Examples of 'scenius' where highly-competitive tightly-communicating groups had surprisingly large effects and often finding low-hanging fruit (somehow) eluding generations before them.
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Compilation of links demonstrating that it is common to find order-of-magnitude speedups in software, especially when designed carefully for (extraordinarily powerful) contemporary computer hardware with end-to-end principled thinking.
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Generating Irish/folk/classical music in ABC format using GPT-2-117M, with good results.
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A review of Russell 1986's Like Engend'ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England, describing development of selective breeding and discussing models of the psychology and sociology of innovation.
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An annotated fulltext bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth.
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Review of Roland & Shiman 2002 history of a decade of ARPA/DARPA involvement in AI and supercomputing, and the ARPA philosophy of technological acceleration; it yielded mixed results, perhaps due to ultimately insurmountable bottlenecks---the time was not yet ripe for many goals.
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A common dream in philosophy and politics and religion is the idea of languages superior to evolved demotics, whether Latin or Lojban, which grant speakers greater insight into reality and rationality, analogous to well-known efficacy of mathematical sub-languages in solving problems. This dream fails because such languages gain power inherently from specialization.
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After putting up with slow glitchy WiFi Internet for years, I investigate improvements. Upgrading the router, switching to a high-gain antenna, and installing a buried Ethernet cable all offer increasing speeds.
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Danbooru2021 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.9m+ images annotated with 162m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation.
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Analysis of whether bitter melon reduces blood glucose in one self-experiment and utility of further self-experimentation
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Pessimistic forecasters are overconfident in fixating, hedgehog-like, on only one scenario for how they think something must happen; in reality, there are always many ways through the garden of forking paths, and something needs only one path to happen.
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An LLLT user's blinded randomized self-experiment in 2013 on the effects of near-infrared light on a simple cognitive test battery: positive results
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Proposal to use meal-replacements to partition daily variance in mood/productivity between diet and other factors
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Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism: ignoring the surface abstractions and limitations to treat a system as a source of parts to manipulate into a different system, with different (and usually unintended) capabilities.
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A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Compiling academic and media forecaster's 2012 American Presidential election predictions and statistically judging correctness; Nate Silver was not the best.
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Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit
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Technological developments can be foreseen but the knowledge is largely useless because startups are inherently risky and require optimal timing. A more practical approach is to embrace uncertainty, taking a reinforcement learning perspective.
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One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens is a saying in Western philosophy encapsulating a common response to a logical proof which generalizes the reductio ad absurdum and consists of rejecting a premise based on an implied conclusion. I explain it in more detail, provide examples, and a Bayesian gloss.
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Any 'computer' is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
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A retrospective of 8 years of SoC, and lessons learned
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Why Knol is worse than Wikipedia, has failed, and will continue to fail.
5 42 pages
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The Hutter Prize elegantly prevents cheating by charging for model size, but that same rule now excludes the scale regime where modern AI improves. A useful successor would evaluate incremental predictive information on future text under fixed inference compute, and let entrants inherit prior winners’ predictions.
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American public survey suggests meaningful support for organ donation from anencephalic (terminal) babies.
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A poem for the end of the Anthropocene. 3-part Buddhist meditation on the ethics and nature of AI minds, largely written by LLMs.
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James Reason’s Swiss cheese model illuminates how running red lights happens when multiple failures align—not from recklessness but from decision paralysis at the wrong moment. A ‘point of no return’ strategy pre-commits you to either stop or proceed based on a specific spot, creating a fail-safe that eliminates dangerous last-second judgment calls.
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Experiments in translating John Milton’s Paradise Lost to alliterative verse using LLMs, 2023--2026 and prototyping inner-monologue prompts for iterative composition.
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Prototype poems and abandoned draft completions of a William Empson poem, by various LLMs 2022–2025. Samples illustrate the inverted U-curve of LLM creative writing, where RLHF destroyed creativity for a few years. (The final version has been published as “The Fourth Truth Of Pain”.)
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Cookbook of code for common selection & order statistics scenarios in economics, psychology, decision theory, drug development etc.
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Regression-to-a-mean is a general statistical phenomenon which leads to several widespread fallacies in analyzing & interpreting statistical results, such as ‘residual confounding’ and ‘Lord’s paradox’.
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Bibliography of ML papers related to multi-layer perceptrons (fully-connected neural nets), often showing surprising efficacy despite their reputation for being too general to be usable (representing a possible future Bitter Lesson).
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Some interesting links on local optima/greediness/risk-aversion/creative destruction (eg. Porter hypothesis or equity premium puzzle), sometimes demonstrated by disasters.
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Links on land valuation & taxation, single taxes, Georgism, and mechanism design.
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Attempt to resolve Pascal's mugging by examining whether optimal policies with linear utility do in fact engage in 'mugging' behavior
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The Cultural Revolution was one of the greatest disasters in human history, the result of a self-reinforcing cycle of ideology failing to match reality and unsolved social problems, and the deranged reaction of zealots triggering defection and civil warfare.
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Leprechaun hunting the origins of the famous skeptical observation that because millions of events are constantly happening, 'miracles' happen once a month; it was actually coined by Freeman Dyson.
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A tutorial explaining how to train and generate high-quality anime faces with StyleGAN 1+2 neural networks, and tips/scripts for effective StyleGAN use.
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Experiments in using BigGAN to generate anime faces and whole anime images; semi-successful.
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Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored. At scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times.
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Extended book review of Bradshaw 2013 (Cat Sense) on the connections between cat psychology, evolution/genetics, history of domestication or lack thereof, & possible dysgenics, highlighting modern maladaptivity of cat psychology, with key references; speculation on cat toys, knocking things over, and tails.
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A suggested x-risk/Great Filter is the possibility of advanced entertainment technology leading to wireheading/mass sterility/population collapse and extinction. As media consumption patterns are highly heritable, any such effect would trigger rapid human adaptation, implying extinction is almost impossible unless immediate collapse or exponentially accelerating addictiveness.
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A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
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Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of explicit deliberative thought where no natural triggers or habits exist.
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A high-concept Batman short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script (alluding to T. S. Eliot) about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates: pain/guilt/fear/anxiety. Fear death (including by water).
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Evaluating Long Bets as a prediction market shows it is dysfunctional and poorly-structured; despite the irrationality of many users, it is not good even as a way to raise money for charity.
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9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
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How much should we rewatch our favorite movies (media) vs keep trying new movies? Most spend most viewing time on new movies, which is unlikely to be good. I suggest an explicit Bayesian model of imprecise ratings + enjoyment recovering over time for Thompson sampling over movie watch choices.
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In generating a sample of n datapoints drawn from a normal/Gaussian distribution, how big on average the biggest datapoint is will depend on how large n is. I implement a variety of exact & approximate calculations from the literature in R to compare efficiency & accuracy.
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In discussing a large Scottish public health experiment, Student noted that it would've been vastly more efficient using a twin experiment design; I fill in the details with a power analysis.
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Estimation of catnip immunity rates by country with meta-analysis and surveys, and discussion of catnip alternatives.
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Miscellaneous statistical stuff
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Email interview with McCaleb on early history of his MtGox, verifying it did not trade real but online Magic cards
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Does creatine increase cognitive performance? Maybe for vegetarians but probably not.
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A compilation of reviews of books I have read since ~1997.
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2011 New Yorker article with descriptions of early Bitcoin people and mining, and the author's search for Satoshi Nakamoto
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Self-experiment on whether consuming caffeine immediately upon waking results in less time in bed & higher productivity. The results indicate a small and uncertain effect.
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How does LessWrong usage correlate with cryonics attitudes and signup rates?
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Filtered data for a belief can rationally push you away from that belief
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Essay on minimalism, otaku, and hikikomori as esthetic choices reflecting an obsessive focus on perfection of a single activity, exemplified by the unusual sculpture form dorodango (hand-rolling mud into colorful spheres).
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Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
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Attempt to resolve Pascal's mugging by proposing & justifying a linear prior probability which bounds losses.
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Misc thoughts, memories, proto-essays, musings, etc.
4 57 pages
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How much to edit? A top-k attention-window toy model of the publish-polish trade off: You should polish in inverse proportion to how much of your writing a reader will see; the more diverse your writing, the better off you are writing more rather than better.
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A posthuman speaker finds the Port of Oakland’s container cranes still standing in the fog like the dinosaurs whose bones became the oil that forged their steel, and blesses them: stay, wade, become what you always were. 6-part mixed-verse by multiple LLMs, alluding to Gray and ‘The Ruin’ and ‘False Self’. Detailed Colophon discusses LLM writing process, prompts, and AI creativity.
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GPT-5 claims a new poem is weak but easily fixed. I challenge it to do so. It does, sort of, but also shows the flaws in autonomous LLM poetry right now—they need pressure, not polish.
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A poet stands before an audience of AIs spanning the scale of intelligence—from bits to Jupiter-brains—and answers ‘What is a poem?’, reciting a love poem for his dead girlfriend Alice. The poem argues that verse is a compression algorithm for human experience: the poet throws his voice across Lethe, and each reader decompresses Alice from signal, making the AIs creators. The ars poetica enacts its argument, moving from ballad quatrains through trochaic catalog into metrical dissolution, until a tercet closes the contract between poet/machine: ‘Behind each mask, an Alice runs.’
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Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header's JavaScript making HTTP range requests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives.
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Proposal: Speculation on style-aware image generators: using temporally trained embeddings and influence graphs to assign cultural credit, simulate counterfactual art histories, and generate styles rather than isolated images.
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A free-verse ode to aviation’s mundane miracle, using William Carlos Williams’ “so much depends” as structural refrain across six sections—from a torque-spec’d bolt to sleeping passengers to ground observers—culminating in a formally fractured final stanza that breaks the phrase across 17 lines, syntax itself suspended like the plane between blues. (Inspired by a June 2025 flight out of SFO, San Francisco.) Includes bonus Pindarian ode version.
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Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
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On statistical and psychological grounds, we probably are not losing many future Einsteins to speedrunning or streaming or e-sports etc.
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Autobiographical documentary about 'underground artist' Robert Crumb on his 1991 farewell tour, discussing his personality, family, mental health, and source of his graphomanic art.
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Documentary about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge sheds little light on the brute facts of suffering and mental illness—facts which perhaps cannot be conveyed to others (on film or otherwise), and are inherently private.
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Generative modeling proposal for increasing diversity of samples by a helper NN memorizing past samples and ‘repelling’ new samples away from old ones.
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Old neural net technique for runtime (online) learning which boosts performance.
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Review of evidence for Elon Musk being on the bipolar mood disorder spectrum.
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A collaborative AI completion of the second half of William Empson’s poem “This Last Pain” that transforms his locked-door metaphor into a camera obscura of Buddhist no-self doctrine and AI consciousness: the 18-line poem in Empsonian couplets argues that productive knowledge requires constraining distance. 4 AI models (Kimi K2, Gemini-3, Claude-4.5, GPT-5.1) then quarrel irreconcilably over whether the completion succeeds—their fractured disagreement itself demonstrating the poem’s thesis.
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Diffusion models supposedly beat GANs because they scale better and stabler. That is unproven, and false. GANs should be revisited.
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An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 New York Times article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.
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Discussion of how to teach active reading and questioning of scientific research. Partially fake research papers may teach a critical attitude. Various ideas for games reviewed.
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Sketch of a decentralized mineralization-based carbon capture: suppliers stake on reported deposits of mineral dust in publicly-auditable locations.
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Neural networks like GPT-3 power text adventure games where you can do anything; but they are too expensive. I propose that if we turn them into Choose Your Own Adventure hypertext games, they become feasible and enable new gameplay.
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Bibliography of links on the evolution of parasocial relationships online: more than social media acquaintances or influencer-consumption, less than true social relationships, typically with money involved somewhere; implications for the future of human relationships/media and artificial intelligence?
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Description of 3 anime datasets for machine learning based on Danbooru: cropped anime faces, whole-single-character crops, and hand crops (with hand detection model).
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Speculative world-building about a clonal humanity, based on identical twins and asexual reproduction.
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Fermi estimates or problems are quick heuristic solutions to apparently insoluble quantitative problems rewarding clever use of real-world knowledge and critical thinking; bibliography of some examples.
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Variance components analyses focus on estimating the net contribution of an entire group of variables to an outcome, without requiring estimating each variable; this is critical for learning if the haystack of variable contains a needle at all, and yet, this approach is hardly used outside behavioral genetics. That should change.
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A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.
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Catalogue of errors or problems caused by cats randomly doing things (ie. real-life fuzz testing).
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Account of well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to conscript unintelligent or outright mentally-retarded men into fighting in the Vietnam War after remedial education, illustrating the difficulty of social interventions, the practical consequences of low intelligence, and the cruelty & evil of ignoring the reality of individual differences.
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A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
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Proposal: the spacing curve could be used to review only flashcards one has forgotten, instead of almost forgotten. This inverse or opposite spaced repetition system would be useful for systematic efficient reviewing of indefinitely large sets of notes, citations, movies or other media to rewatch, etc., which could not feasibly be memorized, but which would generate serendipity or re-assesments if reviewed at some point in the distant future.
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Someone (who is not me) should do something: a wishlist of miscellaneous research or project ideas—free to a good home.
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A randomized blinded self-experiment of the effects of ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6) on my sleep; results suggest small benefit to sleep quality but are underpowered and damaged by Zeo measurement error/data issues.
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A book study of surveys of the high-IQ elementary school HCES concludes that high IQ is not predictive of accomplishment; I point out that the disappointing results are consistent with the subjects not being geniuses due to regression to a mean (because of extremely early IQ tests) & small sample size.
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International population online surveys of cat owners about catnip and other cat stimulant use.
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Many multi-step processes look like 'leaky pipelines', where a fractional loss/success happens at every step. Such multiplicative processes can often be modeled as a log-normal distribution (or power law), with counterintuitive implications like skewed output distributions and large final differences from small differences in per-step success rates.
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Multilevel modeling of effect of small group's meditation on math errors
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Does Google Alerts return fewer results each year? A statistical investigation
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2 self-experiments on potassium citrate effects on sleep: harm to sleep when taken daily or in the morning
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On Bayesian updating of beliefs in sequentially searching a set of possibilities where failure is possible, such as waiting for a bus; the psychologically counterintuitive implication is that success on the next search increases even as the total probability of success decreases.
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A log of experiments done on the site design, intended to render pages more readable, focusing on the challenge of testing a static site, page width, fonts, plugins, and effects of advertising.
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1955 letters of John Nash and the NSA on a cryptosystem and Nash's belief that near-perfect cryptography could exploit exponential difficulties.
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AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Many writers anecdotally report they write best first thing early in the morning, apparently even if they are not morning people. Do they, and why?
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Scraping and downloading Haskell-related repositories from GitHub
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A precis of my old work on the English Wikipedia, 2004–2017 (edit counts, articles by subject, and particularly notable articles)
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Individual human brains are more predictable and similar than they are different, reflecting low Kolmogorov complexity and implying that beta uploading may be more feasible than guessed, with suggestions on optimizing archived information.
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Does the convergence of religious experiences point to a shared truth?
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How small must be the computer simulating the universe?
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Cynical tactics encouraged by Wikipedia's abdication of thought known as 'No Original Research' and 'Reliable Sources'
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Back of envelope financial calculations: Warranties, fine; insurance, no!
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Game theory on BSD versus GPL: partnership? Is GPL an evolutionary stable strategy against invasion by proprietary copyright strategies?
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Criteria making software useful long-term & worth learning in detail
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Lessons learned about bitrot in Haskell software
3 74 pages
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Deep reinforcement learning explained in small words in Grow-Speech, a controlled-English dialect that defines each technical term before use and reduces the field to ‘try, score, and change’.
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A Calvinoesque philosophical miniature about a Silk Road city whose citizens cast horoscopes at birth, seal them until death, and elevate compatibilism into civic rite.
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Discussion of AI-invented poetic meter for writing Pindaric odes in English. Testing on a Pindar translation, it may be a viable meter.
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3 ‘Coastal Spondaic’ poems on walking: over sand, rain, and wood; under tide, forest, and rot.
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Proposal: train LLMs to predict Stan code from synthetic data sampled from Stan’s prior predictives. The output is an interpretable, executable Bayesian model, and a symbolic posterior over model structure. Possibly useful for faster inference, search, and interpretability.
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Pindaric ode commemorating millions of laboratory animals sacrificed for science, in a strict alliterative meter. Synthesizing the history of mice strains with mythic figures like Laika/OncoMouse, the poem explores the covenant between researcher and subject. From the granaries of Abbie Lathrop to the tragedy of euthanasia or release, it seeks to elevate these unwilling martyrs to a place of memory. By transforming the cold ‘ledger’ of data into ‘gold’ of song, the ode attempts to pay the moral debt that statistics alone cannot settle.
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Video games are art, but a strange art: their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player. This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible—you can point at the moon, but it’s not the moon, and once someone sees it, they no longer need the pointing.
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Proposal for a conference organization tool modeled after ad hoc collaboration tools like tabletop roleplaying games or disaster response: just have everyone scribble on a map of the conference location.
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List-processing tricks for generating embeddings at different levels of document abstraction to allow efficient semantic searching.
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Copyright mechanism proposal to solve the orphan works problem: self-assessed Harberger taxes on any inherited copyright are then invested, and dedicated to eventually buying out the owners. Works are either immediately public-domained, or the owners voluntarily 'sell' them if their value underperforms a baseline investment.
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Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
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A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
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Proposal to create a 'search engine' like OEIS but for individual numbers, allowing fuzzy lookups, by training a neural net embedding on the scientific & mathematic literature's corpus of co-occurring numbers, and by known special transformations.
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Speculation on why 3-move games like Rock-Paper-Scissors are so common in games & decisions: aside from allowing ties, is this design information-theoretically optimal in game difficulty vs information per game?
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Satirical essay on how AI can never truly solve a Rubik’s Cube like human beings can, written by Claude-3.5-sonnet.
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Children's animated fantasy movie with surprisingly deep thoughts about personal identity and immortality.
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Cats are not humans, but we design things like they are, for our convenience. What are the design patterns for cat-architecture? One missing design pattern: progressive concealment, for cat ledges, flaps & window boxes.
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Answer: Too many! After observing 14 unique shower controls across 20 stays while traveling, I used capture-recapture statistics to estimate the total population of designs, finding a likely mean of >34 types but a wide credible interval because I recorded the wrong kind of recapture data. Ultimately, the exercise served as a demonstration of R. A. Fisher’s warning that statistical analysis is too often a ‘post mortem’ that cannot rescue a flawed experimental design.
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Satirical essay on how AI can never truly solve a Rubik’s Cube like human beings can, written by an AI. Inspired by ‘Supersized Machines’ (Garfinkel et al 2017).
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Proposal for applying the AUNN neural net architecture to reconstruction of brains in a modular piece-wise fashion.
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Proposal for applying the AUNN neural net architecture to reconstruction of historical documents using pretrained large language models.
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Explanation of the emotional core of The Quantum Thief’s exploration of the trap of persistent personal identity and seeking freedom.
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Why is Yamato so influential on a generation of anime otaku and later anime, despite a weak story and compromised production? It offers a fantasy WWII in which Imperial Japan is the hero, and all its sins projected onto an imaginary enemy.
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The activity of manufactured collecting is puzzling; what explains the enormous resources spent on what is, by and large, neither lucrative, prestigious, nor entertaining? Is it just a misfire and quirk of human psychology poorly adapted to industrial society where 'collectibles' can be varied and marketed 24/7/365?
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Chemicals active at the nanogram scale are invisible, difficult to observe, and near-impossible to clean or remove; but they are still psychoactive enough to torment you like demons.
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Flamewars over platforms & upgrades are so bitter not because people are jerks but because the choice will influence entire ecosystems, benefiting one platform through network effects & avoiding 'bitrot' while subtly sabotaging the rest through 'bitcreep'.
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Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize.
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Real-world examples of using advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books.
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Did John Calhoun's 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for doubt.
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I describe how I made the website ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net (TWDNE) for displaying random anime faces generated by StyleGAN neural networks, and how it went viral.
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A compilation of opera reviews since 2019.
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The multiple-invention (>3) history of the idea of extremely-powerful embryo selection by using gametogenesis to run many 'generations' in vitro.
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Acne is a good way to learn self-experiments for teenagers. I offer tips on what one could do, and an initial list of crowdsourced interventions to test from CureTogether.
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A meditation on subcultures & review of the cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, focusing on fandom, plot, development, and meaning of bronydom.
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Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.
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Decision analysis of whether cloning the most elite Special Forces dogs is a profitable improvement over standard selection procedures. Unless training is extremely cheap or heritability is extremely low, dog cloning is hypothetically profitable.
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Discussion of fictional eugenics program in the SF Dune-verse and how it contradicts contemporary known human genetics but suggests heavy agricultural science and Mendelian inspiration to Frank Herbert's worldview.
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Review of Isao Takahata’s last & greatest film on how to accept the transience of life, filled as it is with both joy & sorrow.
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Commandline tool providing interactive statistical pairwise ranking and sorting of items
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Some claim the disease hydrocephalus reduces brain size by 95% but often with normal or even above-average intelligence, and thus brains aren't really necessary. Neither is true.
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Analysis of 2013–2014 LessWrong survey results on how much more self-identified EAers donate suggests low median donation rates due to current youth and low incomes.
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Using modern statistical analysis, how quickly should improved bladder stone surgical methods have been adopted?
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List of academic urban legends, and references on how often writers do not check references, which seems to be a major reason for their propagation.
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A small 2014–2015 non-blinded self-experiment using Bacopa monnieri to investigate effect on memory/sleep/self-ratings in an ABABA design; no particular effects were found.
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A compilation of movie, television, and opera reviews since 2014.
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Is sleep affected by the phase of the moon? An analysis of several years of 4 Zeo users' sleep data shows no lunar cycle.
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Discussion of Cordwainer Smith SF story, arguing that the pain-of-space is based on forgotten psychological issues in air travel, and concerns about worse ones in space travel, which were partially vindicated by the existence of interesting psychological changes in astronauts.
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3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium l-threonate and magnesium citrate.
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Forgotten chores and their use by Romanticism
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A small fraction of human responses will always be garbage because we are lazy, bored, trolling, or crazy.
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Statistically modeling reviews for ongoing story with R.
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Notes relating to my use of a treadmill desk and 2 self-experiments showing walking treadmill use interferes with typing and memory performance.
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On divining the esoteric truth of Neo-Venezia through holes in world-building.
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Meta page describing Gwern.net editing activity, traffic statistics, and referrer details, primarily sourced from Google Analytics (2011-present).
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A compilation of anime/manga reviews since 2010.
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How and why did they deduce atomism?
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Meta page describing Gwern.net site ideals of stable long-term essays which improve over time; idea sources and writing methodology; metadata definitions; site statistics; copyright license.
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Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
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Generalizing functions with hardwired values
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Archiving using Wikipedia Recent Changes RSS feed (obsolete).
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Extensive anthology of Gainax/Anno/Evangelion quotes, excerpts, sources, references, and analyses, organized by reliability and year.
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Who am I online & what have I done? Contact information; sites I use; computers and software tools; things I've worked on; psychological profiles
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Haskell juvenilia, reinventing entry-level math wheels, of no interest to anyone; investigating when two theories or representations mean the same things.
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recursion into iteration; primality testing
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Syntax, function definitions
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Links to various resources for SICP studying
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Remaining materials towards one day building and trying out a real fog gun
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Why Wikipedia and YouTube will never be integrated.
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Exploring consequences of material monism and conflict with observations
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Haskell: tutorial on writing a daemon to archive links in Wikipedia articles with TagSoup and WebCite; obsolete.
2 53 pages
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Bureaucratic-horror fiction: the molting chapter of a statutory owner's manual for companion mimes, with glossary excerpts and a completed Grade III incident-notification form.
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Web design post-mortem of ways to typeset poetry and how we developed our advanced approach. Possible approaches are PDF plugins, PNG screenshots, semantic class soup, and Pandoc line blocks. Gwern.net has a two-tier system: div.poem for stanzaic verse with automatic enjambment, pre.poem-html implementing 'Source Code WYSIWYG' with Nimbus Mono L font and JS inline-width compensation. Covers slash/caesura syntax highlighting, responsive line-breaking, and LLM corpus cleanup.
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Trying out having Gemini-3-pro-preview write system prompts compatible with creative fiction writing (sci-fi short story examples), and trying it out on GPT-5 Pro and Claude-4.5-opus with mixed results.
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Speculation on feline-human fascination being ancestral vigilance triggered by their behavioral similarity to major primate predators, evolutionarily, creating a compelling ‘safe danger’ like watching a captivating villain. We still remember when they ate us.
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Can 2024-era LLMs reason successfully about how to write using only words that could not have appeared in any Bible ever? Mostly.
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There are many luxury goods. Are there luxury websites? They could exist, but mostly don't. Maybe website quality is too hard to understand right now.
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I manually extract RGB colors for 225 websites and graph them: red > blue > green > purple > yellow–brown.
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The 2007 indie SF film Timecrimes shows the horror & metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the protagonist commits escalating crimes while trapped in a 3-iteration loop enabled by a time machine-or rather, caused by it.
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We develop AI image generation workflows for webpage dropcap typography, creating PNGs & SVGs using image generators. As demos, we create new Gwern.net logos and several custom FLOSS dropcap sets, including felines, Gene Wolfe horror fiction, and neural-net-inspired dropcaps.
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Harold Bloom amusingly recommends all students as his ‘best student ever’; modeled as a ‘record value’ order statistics problem, this is more common than it seems.
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Some July 2023 Claude-2 & ChatGPT satirical writing samples of gonzo journalism & typography.
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Why do cats like to push stuff over edges and then curiously watch the fallen object? I suggest that they are play-hunting, and are testing the ‘prey’ for liveness & playing-dead, similarly to tossing or poking it with claws.
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Proposal for incentivizing meta-learning of exploration in deep reinforcement learning: domain randomization with reward-shaping, where there is a fixed-length ‘play time’ with no rewards/losses at the beginning of each episode.
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Brief description of how the direct-to-video-rental model helped create the anime boom by allowing wide diversity in bankrolled anime projects, outside the production committee system.
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The Twitter UI/UX for accepting follow requests is a fractal of bad design.
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1-year-long website A/B test of controversial typographic choices of indenting & justifying paragraphs: a fairly precise null result. No design change was made.
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Description of a useful service for web development: a website which wraps a neural network trained to classify images by whether they would look better inverted in a website/app dark-mode, or faded.
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Why do movies or games go through development hell, and usually come out worse, rather than better, and long gestation times do not seem to improve them despite the large resources poured into them by the most talented people?
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In typography/design, 'sidenotes' place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons.
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A typographic proposal: replace cumbersome inline citation formats like ‘Foo et al. (2010)’ with subscripted dates/sources like ‘Fooet al2020’. Intuitive, easily implemented, consistent, compact, and can be used for evidentials in general.
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Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
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A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.
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Post-mortems of failed neural network experiments in generating anime images, pre-StyleGAN/BigGAN.
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170 aphorisms, mini essays or poems on life by James Richardson
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Review of famous light novel series Umineko no Naku Koro ni: it is a highly idiosyncratic, wildly self-indulgent, yet impressive exploration of all possible locked-room mysteries, knocked for a loop mid-composition by personal tragedy, triggering a descent into a deeply harmful endorsement of fantasies & running from painful realities.
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Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
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Bakker's Second Apocalypse vs Frank Herbert's Dune: time loops and finding freedom in an unfree universe. In Dune, humanity is liberated by growth and development and escaping the predeterminism of prescience; in Bakker, they are destroyed by it, and liberation is achieved only by death and reunification with a deeper underlying block-universe/monistic reality.
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Blind randomized taste-test of mineral/distilled/tap waters using Bayesian best-arm finding; no large differences in preference.
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Physical beauty & attractiveness of the general population of men/women seems to have increased greatly in the past few centuries, judging by surviving art/photos, contemporary judgments, and objective criteria like missing teeth, likely due to economic/technological/medical/nutritional improvements, but less from cosmetic tricks. Beauty may, however, be in decline very recently as some of those trends reverse (eg. now too much food, not too little).
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Isaac Newton's cosmology apparently involved regular apocalypses caused by comets overstoking the furnace of the Sun and the repopulation of the Solar System by new intelligent species. He supports this speculation with an interestingly-incorrect anthropic argument.
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I compare my electric tea kettle to my stove kettle, and apply some simple statistical modeling verifying the electric is faster.
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Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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Commandline folklore: sorting files by filename or content before compression can save large amounts of space by exposing redundancy to the compressor. Examples and comparisons of different sorts.
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Downloading and parsing TPB metadata to estimate Bitcoin usage and revenue for uploaders
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In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
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Describing HN submissions; estimating manipulability
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Short essays on the influence on Japanese culture of anime works Daicon, Evangelion, Space Battleship Yamato, and the artists Mr., Chiho Aoshima, and others.
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Essay by Pop Art artist Takashi Murakami on Japanese society and on WWII infantilizing Japanese culture as revealed by media, anime, and otaku.
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Testing enhances later recall by highschool students of a history text
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1995 interview of former Gainax president Toshio Okada on Gainax's history, Wings of Honneamise, Aoki Uru, etc.
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Objectively, anime/manga better than American alternatives. So why the need to justify?
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Fulltext annotated e-book of 2002 memoir by anime producer Yasuhiro Takeda, discussing Japanese SF conventions & fandom, formation & history of Gainax and its productions up to 2002, including the origins of Evangelion & the tax raid.
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Meta page describing Gwern.net website design experiments and post-mortem analyses.
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Descartes's God is pantheism; a reductio ad absurdum of his ontology
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Dialogue pointing out some difficulties of materialist objections to abortion.
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Ambiguous ending of Death Note means even the victor is unclear; who was right?
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Copyright considered paradoxical, incoherent, and harmful from an information theory and compression perspective as there is no natural kind corresponding to 'works', merely longer or shorter strings for stupider or smarter algorithms.
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Haskell: step by step refactoring to concision
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Stoic meditation with reference to being homeless. Written to myself at a particularly low point; like many, I take comfort in considering how things could be worse.
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China & Egypt used wooden pillows; my recreations fail
1 43 pages
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Go-Speech is a controlled-English writing format that improves Grow-Speech's left-to-right vocabulary growth with an Up-Goer-Five-style Basic-English Databank. Intended for LLM prompting, audit, and child-facing humorous explanation.
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Formal specification of Guy L. Steele’s 1998 controlled-vocabulary English writing system, which requires all multi-syllabic core words to be explicitly defined before use. Intended for LLM use.
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Pulp SF novel about mind-controlling evil UFO alien abductions seems more about BDSM and furries than appreciated, possibly explaining its early popularity and eventual disappearance.
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Ideas for a costume party game revolving around guessing identities, with an asymmetrical twist.
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Western TV animation is often shockingly ugly and crude compared to other animation like French or Japanese. Why, when it’s not even cheaper? Degenerate echoes of what were once cutting-edge art.
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An esoteric document proposal: abuse Unicode to create the fanciest possible ‘plain text’ documents.
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Is it possible to prove the existence of retrocognition if precognition also exists, because precognition could be used to foresee any proof found of retrocognition? Does this also disprove precognition as well?
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Timothy Falcon's quantitative-finance interview problem #14 asks for the optimal stopping strategy when playing a card-drawing game of l cards where red = +$1 & black = −$1; the value approaches 0.5 × √l. I re-solve it with dynamic programming in R, and others in Neat, Haskell & C, with increasing efficiency.
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Microwaving water for tea makes it taste bad, for unknown reasons. Is it a lack of bubbles? Lingering CO2? Comments and proposed experiments.
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Alice Sheldon's SF short story 'The Screwfly Solution' is misread by most readers as an alien attack driving men to insane violence; a closer revisionist read shows that the alien attack affected women as well, into suicidal passivity.
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Looking into the oldest edible food suggests a range of 0.05--20mya food, after discarding myths like honey or woolly mammoth.
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Fonts are durable, highly-reusable, compact, & high-quality software products which do not 'bitrot'. Nevertheless, hundreds or thousands of new ones come out every year despite enormous duplication; why? I speculate that designer boredom seems to be the answer: they crave novelty.
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Collation of anecdotes and speculation about why many cats like earwax, and human earwax especially. Is it the valeric acid? Plus human sweat.
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I explain the somewhat arbitrary-seeming death of the popular Star Wars character Grand Admiral Thrawn as being the logical culmination of a tragic character arc in which his twisted (or ‘thrawn’) cunning & scheming, one of his defining traits, ultimately backfires on him, causing his bodyguard to betray & assassinate him.
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I wondered how fast deer could evolve to avoid car fatalities. Truncation selection with known mortality and generation length suggests that it would take a long time even with high heritability.
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In MLP:FiM, the 3 pony races sometimes bear offspring of other pony races; I review 4 complicated Mendelian models attempting to explain this, and note that a standard polygenic liability-threshold model can fit it parsimoniously.
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Short story on the limits of propaganda and 'Newspeak' using a constructed language; from Chapter 11 of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, volume 4, The Citadel of the Autarch.
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Monthly chronological list of recent major writings/changes/additions to Gwern.net (see also the monthly newsletter).
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Collect music metadata and look for patterns
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Kunihiko Ikuhara and staff episode and music commentary/discussion 1997–2011 on the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena; discusses origins of ideas and meaning of themes, and video/audio remastering for the DVD box set.
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Famous Ted Chiang SF short story ‘Story Of Your Life’ is usually misinterpreted as, like the movie version Arrival, being about time-travel/precognition; I explain it is instead an exploration of xenopsychology and a psychology of timeless physics.
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English translation of French translation of Hideaki Anno's controversial NewType interview at the end of the TV broadcast
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Definition of otaku, mania, moe, dame, anime, and generations
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Recording fan speculation for retrospectives
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English translation of a French anime journalist's interview of Hideaki Anno on anime and Evangelion in 1996-10-04.
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Do mindless positive/negative comments skew article quality ratings up and down?
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Implementing the Hypertime multiverse model of time travel in Haskell
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Working at Gainax, Evangelion's production & censorship, anime translation
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Translated interviews about making Evangelion 2.0 w/Anno, Higuchi, Enokido, & Tsurumaki
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Teas I have drunk, with reviews and future purchases; focused primarily on oolongs and greens. Plus experiments on water.
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Race as reflected in gender ratios within fictional bi-racial marriages in anime/manga show equal sex ratios and Western European overrepresentation with striking absence of Korean characters.
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a comprehensive taxonomy of predictions on future Evangelion media
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Essay on writing waka on truth & lies
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Observations on Frank Herbert's Dune series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was not a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II's Golden Path creating Paul Atreides and the events of Dune.
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Evangelion thoughts---anti-religion, pro-psychology, character development, otaku genre.
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Argument that texts are neither moral nor immoral as they require active interpretation.
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Re-inventing anarcho-capitalism in a French context. (Obviously wrong juvenilia kept for historical reasons.)
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Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of Death Note Hollywood script being real.
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Literary analysis of the light novel/anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: Haruhi is not God, Kyon is
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On the interpretation of Gene Wolfe's short story ‘Suzanne Delage’ as inversion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula horror novel.
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An attempt to reinvent classic theories of social interaction as expressions of power
0 16 pages
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A 9-part lyric narrative poem in mostly loose 13-syllable ABAB quatrains, punctuated by terse italic weekday refrains that read as a chore-and-ritual checklist. Beginning with a father patrolling “ghosts” and the speaker’s childhood nightmares, it follows how an adult partner’s hands become a private pre-verbal grammar before focusing on everyday life then parenthood, where the same gesture is inherited. The closing image—daughter’s hand into yours into mine—turn vigilance into steadiness and haunted memory into hard-won tenderness.
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Short story about ‘The Institute of September the Thirtieth’, dedicated to the study of a single day in 1939, in the form of a review of a fictional book.
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Variations on the idea of criminals being convicted and sentenced to a ‘second’ life sentence—what could that possibly mean...?
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Curious what the first 'unused' alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym 'CQK', with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests alphabetical order effects as well as letter-frequency.
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Bibliography of papers on math & physics methods of hunting lions in the Sahara Desert.
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I scrape Arxiv to find underused Greek variables which can add some diversity to math; the top 10 underused letters are ϰ, ς, υ, ϖ, Υ, Ξ, ι, ϱ, ϑ, & Π. Avoid overused letters like λ, and spice up your next paper with some memorable variables!
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Inline HTML snippets for the videos of the 2 famous Gainax fan-made convention anime, for easier transclusion (and as a test-case).
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1963 Slovenian poem on the morality of raising rabbits for meat.
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Spirulina users' randomized trial on self-rated allergy symptoms: null result.
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Post-WWII ambiguity causes otakudom
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Ratings of mead and fruit wines I have tried.
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Gene Wolfe on the depth and ending of novel series
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Short history of trends in Japanese erotic anime and manga, especially lolicon
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Perspective and interpretation
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The unexpected critical depths of a single throw-away scene
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Philosophical fiction or a prose poem about suffering innocents and the theodicy