A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.| gwern.net
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’.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
An annotated fulltext bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)| gwern.net
Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source| gwern.net
Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.| gwern.net
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net
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.| gwern.net