This is the website of Gwern Branwen, writer & independent researcher. I am most interested in psychology, statistics, and technology; I am best known for my writings on the darknet markets & Bitcoin, blinded self-experiments & Quantified Self analyses, dual n-back & spaced repetition, and modafinil.

For information about my site’s philosophy, method, traffic statistics, and implementation, see the About page; for information about myself, my use of other websites, and contact information, see the Links page; for information about new pages, see the Changelog; to receive updates, news, & reviews, subscribe to the newsletter (archives).

Most popular

• Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice
• Darknet Market Archives (2013–2015)
• Darknet Market Arrests (2011–2015)
• Modafinil
• LSD microdosing self-experiment
• Zeo sleep self-experiments
• Dual N-Back FAQ
• Spaced repetition
• Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
• Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement
• Google web services survival analysis
• Banner Ads Considered Harmful (Here)
• The Neural Net/Tank Urban Legend
• Time-lock cryptography
• Archiving URLs
• Terrorism is not about Terror
• The Melancholy of Subculture Society

Notable

• Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation
• Embryo selection for intelligence
• When Should I Check The Mail?
• Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs
• Complexity no Bar to AI
• Death Note script authenticity
• The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
• Iodine & Adult IQ meta-analysis
• The Melancholy of Kyon
• In Defense of Inclusionism on Wikipedia
• Bitcoin is Worse is Better
• Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?

By topic:

Statistics

• Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation
• When Does The Mail Come? Decision Analysis
• Predicting Google service closures
• Predicting & Prediction Markets
• Banner Ads Considered Harmful (Here)
• Judging the 2012 election forecasters
• Candy Japan’s new-box A/B test
• Interactively Resorting Lists
• Google Alerts Over Time
• Expected Maximum of Gaussians
• Multi-Stage Selection JS Demo
• Power of Twins: the Milk Experiment
• Genius Revisited: High-IQ School Flaws
• Modeling fiction review rates
• LW Effective Altruism donations, 2013–2014
• Miscellaneous

Crypto/Bitcoin

• Time-lock encryption
• Bitcoin is Worse is Better
• A Silk Road 1 Guide
• DNM census/lifetimes
• DNM archives (2013–2015)
• DNM arrests (2011–2015)
• Timestamping w/Bitcoin

AI

• Complexity no Bar to AI
• Tool AIs Want To Be Agent AIs
• Danbooru2018 Anime Image Dataset
• Kelly Coin-Flip Game: Solutions
• The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
• RNN mimicking multiple authors
• Evolution as Backstop for Learning

• This Waifu Does Not Exist (details)

• Hyperbolic Time Chambers as Brain Emulations

CS

• Haskell Summer of Code
• Archiving URLs
• The 3 Grenades
• Surprisingly Turing-Complete
• Archiving GitHub
• Simulation inferences
• Choosing Software
• Elegant Run Length Encoding
• Wikipedia Archive Bot
• WP RSS bot
• WP redirect generator
• Resilient Haskell Software
• Evolutionary Licenses
• SICP Introduction (ch1.1, 1.2, 1.3)
• Internet WiFi improvement
• A/B testing CSS & HTML

Psychology

• Spaced Repetition & Learning
• Dual N-Back FAQ (meta-analysis)
• Embryo selection for intelligence
• Catnip:
  • Response rate meta-analysis
  • Surveys
• Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?
• Iodine/IQ meta-analysis
• SMPY Bibliography
• Conscientiousness & Online Schools
• Robert Bakewell & Inventing Breeding
• Open Questions
• What is the morning-writing effect?

QS

• Sleep:

  • Melatonin
  • Modafinil
  • Sleep self-experiments:
    • Caffeine
    • Potassium
    • Redshift/f.lux
    • Vitamin D
    • ZMA
  • Wooden pillows
  • Lunar circadian rhythms
• Nootropics experiments
• LSD microdosing
• Nicotine
• Creatine/cognition meta-analysis
• Lithium in ground-water review
• Spirulina allergy experiment
• Bitter melon blood-glucose experiment
• Meditation & math errors
• Weather/mood
• Treadmill memory/typing experiment
• Bacopa quasi-experiment

Practical

• Commoditize Your Complement
• Evolutionary Heuristics for Drugs
• Internet Searcquestioh Tips
• Girl Scouts & Good Governance
• Plastination vs Cryonics
• Charity is not about helping
• Console Insurance
• Life contracts

Politics

• The Melancholy of Subculture Society
• Terrorism is not about Terror
• Terrorism is not Effective
• Moore’s law & chip fabs
• Littlewood's Law & the Global Media
• Colder Wars

Philosophy

• Existential Risks & Math Errors
• On Powerful Natural Languages
• Culture is not about Esthetics
• The Narrowing Circle
• Newton's System of the World & Comets
• Ontological pantheism
• Bicycles & Rationality
• On Disrespect
• Justifications
• Against The Miletians
• An Abortion Dialogue
• Copyright
• Immoral Books
• Isomorphisms
• Moral Sperm Donation
• On Stress
• Zen & the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Fiction

• Prose:

  • “The Erl King”
  • “The Ones Who Walk Towards Acre”
  • “Missing Cities”
  • “Men of Iron”
  • “Gilles Goullet, Author of Blindsight”
  • “How the Panther got Black”
  • “The Palace of Wonders”
  • “The Gift of the Amygdali”
  • Cloud Nine
  • “The Last Muezzin”
  • Dinosaur Comics comics
  • “The Buddha’s Wheel”

• Verse:

  • Poems
  • ‘Brave poem’
  • ‘Dying Outside’
  • Poems on the theme of Genshiken
  • ‘Safecracker’
  • ‘Hybrid Rainbow’

• Criticism:

  • “Story Of Your Life” Is Not Time-Travel
  • Genetics & Eugenics in Herbert's Dune
  • On Wolfe’s “Suzanne Delage”
  • “Scanners Live in Vain” as realistic SF
  • The Mulberry Tree
  • The Snowbanks of Time

Anime

• The Melancholy of Kyon
• Death Note:
  • L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
  • Who Wrote The Movie?
  • On The Ending
• My Little Pony: Immanetizing The Equestrian
• Hafu Gender Ratios in Anime
• Aria’s past, present, & future
• FMP parody
• “Komm Susser Tod”

Docs

• Radiance (annotated Scholz novel)
• Metamagical Themas: “Sanity and Survival” (Hofstadter)
• “The Iron Law of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules” (Rossi)
• John Nash on cryptography & P=NP (1955)
• “Ups & Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search”
• Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails
• “The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin & its mysterious inventor”
• “Shiny balls of Mud” (Gibson)
• “Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works” (Wolfe)
• “Loyal to the Group of Seventeen's Story—The Just Man” (Wolfe)
• “The Sword of Achilles” (Asimov)
• Drugs 2.0: “Your Crack’s in the Post” (Mike Power)
• 2014 Jed McCaleb MtGox interview
• Research Bounties On Documents

Anime docs

• Evangelion sources anthology
• The Notenki Memoirs (Takeda)
• NGE 2.0 Complete Records Collection (CRC)
• “Conscience of the Otaking” (Okada)
• “Gainax translator Michael House interview”
• 1996 Hideaki Anno interview
• 1997 Hideaki Anno interview (French)
• “Talk About RahXephon”
• “Special Talk: Yutaka Izubuchi x Hideaki Anno”
• “Otaku Talk” (Okada, Morikawa etc)
• “Earth in My Window” (Murakami)
• Utena 2011 Boxset Commentary
• “On The Battlefield of ‘Superflat’” (Sawaragi)
• “Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive” (Sarrazin)

Wikipedia

• In Defense Of Inclusionism
• Wikipedia & Darkside Editing
• Wikipedia & Other Wikis
• Wikipedia & YouTube
• Wikipedia & Knol
• My Wikipedia articles

Personal

• About / Links / newsletter archives
• Notes
• Epigrams
• Book reviews/ratings
• Tea reviews/Mead
• ICON notes: 2010 / 2011 / 2012
• Blackmail attempts