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 work 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 recently added pages, see the Changelog; to be notified of updates, subscribe to my newsletter or RSS.
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
- Google web services survival analysis
- 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
- The Hyperbolic Time Chamber as Brain Emulation Analogy
- Death Note script authenticity
- The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
- Iodine and 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? A decision-theoretic analysis
- Predicting Google service closures
- Predicting & Prediction Markets
- Existential Risks & Math Errors
- Judging the 2012 election forecasters
- Candy Japan’s new box A/B test
- The Kelly Coin-Flipping Game: Exact Solutions
- Google Alerts over time
- Resorting lists with comparisons
- Expected Maximums of Gaussian Samples
- Modeling fiction readers’ review rates
- Miscellaneous
Crypto/Bitcoin
CS
- Haskell Summer of Code
- Complexity no Bar to AI
- Tool AIs Want To Be Agent AIs
- Archiving URLs
- Danbooru2017 Large-Scale Anime Image Dataset
- RNN mimicking multiple authors
- The 3 Grenades
- Surprisingly Turing-Complete
- Archiving GitHub
- Simulation inferences
- Choosing Software
- 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
- The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
Psychology
QS
Practical
Politics
Philosophy
- Culture is not about Esthetics
- On Powerful Natural Languages
- Ontological pantheism
- The Narrowing Circle
- Bicycles and Rationality
- On Disrespect
- Justifications
- Against The Miletians
- An Abortion Dialogue
- Copyright
- Immoral Books
- Isomorphisms
- Moral Sperm Donation
- On Stress
- Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance
Fiction
Prose:
Verse:
Criticism:
Anime
Docs
- Radiance (annotated Scholz novel)
- Metamagical Themas: “Sanity and Survival” (Hofstadter)
- "The Iron Law of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules" (Peter H. Rossi on evaluating social programs)
- John Nash on cryptography (1955)
- “The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search” (Falk et al)
- “Shiny balls of Mud: William Gibson Looks at Japanese Pursuits of Perfection”
- “Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works” (Wolfe)
- “The Sword of Achilles” (Isaac Asimov)
- Drugs 2.0: “Your Crack’s in the Post” (Mike Power)
Anime docs
- NGE source anthology (all)
- The Notenki Memoirs (Takeda)
- NGE 2.0 Complete Records Collection (Anno etc)
- “Conscience of the Otaking” (Okada)
- “Interviewing Gainax translator Michael House”
- 1996 Hideaki Anno interview
- 1997 Hideaki Anno interview
- “Talk About RahXephon: In Search of Fantasy & Details” (Oshii)
- “Special Talk: Yutaka Izubuchi x Hideaki Anno”
- “Otaku Talk” (Okada, Morikawa etc)
- “Earth in My Window” (Murakami)
- “On The Battlefield of ‘Superflat’” (Sawaragi)
- “Ero-Anime: Manga Comes Alive” (Sarrazin)