Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “The causal influence of brain size on human intelligence: Evidence from within-family phenotypic associations and GWAS modeling”, Lee et al 2019

  • “Recovery of [full height/BMI] trait heritability from whole genome sequence data”, Wainschtein et al 2019 (WGS heritability approaches full heritability, implying that moving beyond SNP data will increase the ceiling for GWASes greatly for many traits)

  • “Genetic analysis identifies molecular systems and biological pathways associated with household income”, Hill et al 2019

  • “Natural History Museums Are Teeming With Undiscovered Species” (sequencing preserved museum collection samples for retrospective studies); “A New Method of Trace DNA Testing Could Solve More Shootings” (sequencing extremely tiny amounts from gun shells); “Is DNA Left on Envelopes Fair Game for Testing? The genealogist’s dream of testing old, spit-laced artifacts is coming true—but raising questions about who controls dead people’s DNA” (genotyping & phenotyping the graveyard; why rob von Neumann’s grave if you can just buy a letter?)

  • “A multicellular way of life for a multipartite virus”, Sicard et al 2019 (media; “multipartite” viruses get even weirder)

• Engineering:

  • “Enabling large-scale genome editing by reducing DNA nicking”, Smith et al 2019 (the Church lab does it again—a shocking increase of 2 orders of magnitude in repetitive edits: from ~60 to ~2.6k CRISPR-style edits in a single cell! Did I too hastily write off genetic editing as a potential game-changer?)

  • “The Ride of Their Lives: Children prepare for the world’s most dangerous organized sport” (“2 decades of selective breeding has made rodeo bulls more dangerous and valuable than ever before”)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Ant collective behavior is heritable and shaped by selection”, Walsh et al 2019

AI:

• “The Bitter Lesson” of AI Research: Compute Beats Clever (Rich Sutton)

• “Exploring Neural Networks with Activation Atlases”, Carter et al 2019

• “A Replication Study: Machine Learning Models Are Capable of Predicting Sexual Orientation From Facial Images”, Leuner2019 (the homosexuality ‘face detector’ appears to survive its first replication)

• “Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry” (SSC; on GPT-2-117M-poetry)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Error! What Biomedical Computing Can Learn From Its Mistakes”, Sainani2011

Politics/religion:

• “Why Fears of Fake News Are Overhyped”, Brendan Nyhan (fake news is relatively rare & consumed by decreasingly many Americans)

• “On the referendum #31: Project Maven, procurement, lollapalooza results, & nuclear/AGI safety”, Dominic Cummings (more on x-risks, senility of politics, and project management)

• “In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Guyana After the Jonestown Massacre—Rolling Stone’s 1979_45ya story piecing together what happened after the tragedy masterminded by Rev. Jim Jones”

• From Pan to Fire: Malcolm Muggeridge’s Encounters With Communism & Naziism (SSC review of his autobiography, Chronicles Of Wasted Time)

• The MormonAds Project (deconverting Mormons by using Facebook ad targeting to link them to official LDS apologetics of polygamy, child marriage, etc)

Psychology/biology:

• “The impact of background music on adult listeners: A meta-analysis”, Kampfe et al 2011_13ya (music appears to be energizing but distracting on net)

• “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?”, Agarwal & Gaule2018 (IMO gold medalists are 50x more likely to win a Fields Medal than PhD graduates of US top-10 math programs; see also SMPY)

• “Status as a Service”, Eugene Wei (social networking)

• “Mastering the Art of War: How Patterns of Gameplay Influence Skill in Halo”, Huang et al 2013_11ya (the spacing effect in game skill acquisition?)

• “Long-Term Consequences of Castration in Men: Lessons from the Skoptzy and the Eunuchs of the Chinese and Ottoman Courts”, Wilson & Roehrborn1999

• “Does garlic protect against vampires? An experimental study”, Sandvik & Baerheim1994

Technology:

• “Measuring Long-term Impact of Ads on LinkedIn Feed”, Yan et al 2019 (large reductions in newsfeed consumption due to ad load; commentary)

• “The Cosmic Distance Ladder”, Terence Tao 2010 (how to use geometry to successively calculate distances in the solar system, to nearby stars, the Milky Way, & other galaxies)

• “Invent More, Toil Less”, Beyer et al 2016 (the need to periodically consider what work is make-work & make systemic changes/improvements to eliminate it)

• “Progression of the Inevitable” (Kevin Kelly, fro What Technology Wants)

• “Network Heuristics” (where the falling outlier meets the rising GAN)

• “The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Art Thief: Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history” (security lessons)

• “Cloak and Dagger: Dynamics of Web Search Cloaking”, Wang et al 2011_13ya (blackhat SEO: why Dresden Codak.com was trying to sell you Viagra starting December 2018)

• “Building a working game of Tetris in Conway’s Game of Life”

• “Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator”

• “The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network” (HN)

• Burning sand as an energy storage method?

Economics:

• “Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records [EHRs] Went Wrong: The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, & cheaper. 10 years & $36b later, the system is an unholy mess” (previously: “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers”)

• “The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops; When Aldi arrived in Britain, Tesco and Sainsbury’s were sure they had nothing to worry about. Three decades later, they know better”

Philosophy:

• “Who is Arguing about the Cat? Moral Action and Enlightenment according to Dōgen”, Mikkelson 1997_27ya (“In expressing full function, there are no fixed methods.”)

Fiction:

• “The First Sally (A), or, Trurl’s Electronic Bard”, Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)

Film/TV

Animated:

• Made in Abyss (review)

Live-action:

• Stalker (review)

• Die Walküre opera (review)

Music

Misc:

• “Tomorrow” (Kevin Penkin; MADE IN ABYSS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK {2017}) [classical]

• “Nanachi in the Light” (Kevin Penkin; MADE IN ABYSS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK {2017}) [classical]

• “Hanezeve Caradhina” (Kevin Penkin feat. Takeshi Saito; MADE IN ABYSS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK {2017}) [vocal]

• “Rafters” (Kevin Penkin; MADE IN ABYSS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK {2017}) [classical]

• “Swings and Roundabouts” (Kevin Penkin; MADE IN ABYSS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK {2017}) [classical]

MLP:

• “Luck of the Rose” (Double Cleff {2017}) [pop]

• “Find A Way (lo-fi Hip Hop Remix)” (Yanamosuda {2017}) [trance]

• “Weather Patrol” (ForeverFreest; Beats Me 3 [2017})