This is the website of Gwern Branwen. I write about psychology, statistics, and technology. I am best known for work on the darknet markets & Bitcoin, blinded self-experiments, dual n-back & spaced repetition, and anime neural networks.
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).
Newest
- January 2021 newsletter
- “Danbooru2020: Large-Scale Crowdsourced Tagged Anime Dataset”
- December 2020 newsletter
- November 2020 newsletter
- On Development Hell
- October 2020 newsletter
- September 2020 newsletter
- August 2020 newsletter
- Sidenotes In Web Design
- July 2020 newsletter
- GPT-3 & The Scaling Hypothesis
- GPT-3 Creative Writing
- “PALM Anime Hands Model/
Dataset” - “Holy Wars are Coordination Problems”
Popular
- Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice
- DNM Archives (2013–2015)
- DNM Arrests (2011–2015)
- Modafinil
- LSD microdosing self-experiment
- Zeo sleep self-experiments
- Dual N-Back FAQ
- Spaced repetition
- Death Note: L, Anonymity & Entropy
- Commoditize Your Complement
- Google survival analysis
- Banner Ads Considered Harmful
- This Waifu Does Not Exist (details)
- Neural Net/
Tank Urban Legend - Time-lock cryptography
- Archiving URLs
- Terrorism is not about Terror
- Melancholy of Subculture Society
Notable
- Why Correlation ≠ Causation
- When Should I Check The Mail?
- Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs
- Complexity no Bar to AI
- Making Anime Faces w/
Neural Nets - Death Note script authenticity
- The Existential Risk of Math Errors
- Iodine & Adult IQ meta-analysis
- The Melancholy of Kyon
- In Defense of Wikipedia Inclusionism
- Bitcoin is Worse is Better
- Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?
- Book reviews
Statistics
- Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation
- When Does The Mail Come? Decision Analysis
- Predicting Google service closures
- Predicting & Prediction Markets
- Banner Ads Considered Harmful (Here)
- How To Critique Research?
- Judging the 2012 election forecasters
- Candy Japan’s new-box A/
B test - Interactively Resorting Lists
- Google Alerts Over Time
- Expected Maximum of Gaussians
- Everything Is Correlated
- Multi-Stage Selection JS Demo
- Power of Twins: the Milk Experiment
- Genius Revisited: High-IQ School Flaws
- Modeling fiction review rates
- Modeling fiction drop rates
- LW Effective Altruism donations, 2013–2014
- Miscellaneous
Crypto/Bitcoin
AI
CS
- Surprisingly Turing-Complete
- Archiving URLs
- A/
B testing CSS & HTML - Internet WiFi improvement
- Haskell Summer of Code
- The 3 Grenades
- Archiving GitHub
- Simulation inferences
- Choosing Software
- Wikipedia Archive Bot
- WP RSS bot
- Resilient Haskell Software
- Evolutionary Licenses
- Elegant Run Length Encoding
Psychology
Catnip:
QS
Sleep:
Practical
- Commoditize Your Complement
- Evolutionary Heuristics for Drugs
- Internet Search Tips
- Timing Technology: Media Lab Lessons
- Sidenotes For Web Design
- Rubrication Design Examples
- Ordinary Life Improvements
- Girl Scouts & Good Governance
- Plastination vs Cryonics
- Console Insurance
- On Having Enough Socks
Politics
Philosophy
- Existential Risks & Math Errors
- On Powerful Natural Languages
- The Narrowing Circle
- One Man’s Modus Ponens…
- Culture is not about Esthetics
- Newton’s System of the World & Comets
- On Subscripting Citations
- Ontological pantheism
- An Abortion Dialogue
- On Disrespect
- Justifications
- Against The Miletians
- Copyright
- Immoral Books
- Isomorphisms
Fiction
Prose:
Verse:
Literary Criticism
Anime
Death Note:
Docs
Radiance (Scholz)
Metamagical Themas: “Sanity and Survival” (Hofstadter)
“The Iron Law of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules” (Rossi)
“The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin & its mysterious inventor”
“Shiny balls of Mud” (Gibson)
“The Sword of Achilles” (Asimov)
“Even More Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays” (Richardson)
Gene Wolfe:
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 × Hideaki Anno”
- “Otaku Talk” (Okada, Morikawa etc)
- “Earth in My Window” (Murakami)
- Utena 2011 Boxset Commentary
- “Little Boy” (Murakami)
- “On The Battlefield of ‘Superflat’” (Sawaragi)
- “Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive” (Sarrazin)