/// research.archive // open

whitepapers.xyz

A corkboard for the research-curious. Pinned, annotated, sometimes contradicting.

no.114

On the half-life of citations.

A 2024 study finds the median paper is cited zero times after year three. We re-examine the dataset.

no.087

Coffee & cognition.

Caffeine improves recall by 7% — but only in well-rested subjects, not the under-slept ones it is usually given to.

no.203

The myth of the "10x" engineer.

Productivity variance correlates with codebase familiarity, not innate skill. Implications for hiring.

no.041

Open data, closed minds.

Why publishing datasets does not, by itself, increase reproducibility — and what does.

no.156

A taxonomy of failed predictions.

Six categories of forecast error, and the surprising one that dominates economic models.

no.078

Sleep is a research instrument.

Why your most cited insight comes between hours 5 and 7 of REM, not at the desk.

read this one first ↗ ← debunked, allegedly cf. paper 041

/ thesis 01

The white paper is dead. Long live the fragment.

For half a century the white paper has been the unit of "serious" institutional thinking — fifty pages bound in a PDF, downloaded once and read by no one. The format outlived its medium. Print logic on a screen is a museum exhibit, not a reading experience. We argue the right unit is the fragment: a 200-word claim, a citation, a counter-argument, all networked on a page that admits its own assembly.

This site is the experiment. Read it sideways.

"sideways" = code for nonlinear?

/ citation

Tufte, E. (2006).

Beautiful Evidence.

"To clarify, add detail."

/ data

73%

of cited PDFs are never re-opened by the citing author.

— Internal sample, n=412

/ thesis 02

Citations are conversations, not credentials.

A footnote is not a defensive wall. It is an invitation to argue with someone who is not in the room. We model citations as connection lines, not numbered ornaments. Hover a fragment; the related papers light up. A bibliography is a graph, drawn flat.

If a paper has no enemies in its citation graph, it is probably not saying anything.

graph view = killer feature?

/ definition

Marginalia n.

Notes written in the margin of a text, often more revealing than the text itself.

/ thesis 03

A page is a spatial argument.

Linear documents pretend ideas arrive in order. They do not. The mind triangulates: a claim, a counter-example, a definition, a piece of data, all weighed at once. Layout is not decoration; it is the argument's shape. The broken grid you are reading is itself the thesis.

If you got here by scrolling top-to-bottom, you have already disagreed with us once. Good.

spicy ↑

/ citation

Bauhaus archive (1925).

The grid is a freedom.

"Constraints reveal intent."

/ note

We are publishing fragments, not finished papers. Each fragment has a version, a date, and a dispute history. Read changes, not conclusions.