Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior”, Ganna et al 2019 (as expected, except for the genetic heterogeneity between homosexuality & bisexuality?)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Genomic Evidence for Local Adaptation of Hunter-Gatherers to the African Rainforest”, Lopez et al 2019

• Engineering:

  • 5 Russian couples who are deaf want to try CRISPR so they can have a hearing child by fixing GJB2 gene mutations

AI:

• “Reward Tampering Problems and Solutions in Reinforcement Learning: A Causal Influence Diagram Perspective”, Everitt & Hutter2019 (blog: “Designing agent incentives to avoid reward tampering”; LW)

• “Has dynamic programming improved decision making?”, Rust2018 (some case-studies)

• Matters Of Scale:

  • LM news: MegatronLM, Nvidia (training a GPT-2-8.3B (!), which overfits on their dataset); “GPT-2: 6-Month Follow-Up”, OpenAI (release of GPT-2-774M); “OpenGPT-2: We Replicated GPT-2 Because You Can Too”, Gokaslan & Cohen2019 (public release of an independently-trained GPT-2-1.5b model)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “We Need a New Science of Progress: Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better”, Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen

• “Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design”, Isakov et al 2019

• “Scott and Scurvy”

• The Gambler’s Fallacy in action at the Monte Carlo Casino, 1893-08-18

Politics/religion:

• “How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science”, Mercier2017

• “Mass Shootings: Definitions and Trends”, RAND 2018 (what do statistics like “there were 371 mass shootings in 2015” actually mean?)

• “Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days; The anti-medical dogma of Christian Science led my father to an agonising death. Now the church itself is in decline—and it can’t happen fast enough” (what happens to the large real estate holdings & other assets of a tax-exempt religion which is disappearing?)

• “Why Don’t Colleges Get Rid of Their Bad Fraternities? A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame”

• “Why Men Love War”, Broyles1984

• Review: From Third World to First: The Singapore Story—1965^–₃₅2000_24ya, by Lee Kuan Yew: part 1/, 2: “You are free to agree”, 3: “Race, language, and uncomfortable questions”, 4: “The pathway to power”

• “Peter Thiel’s Religion”, David Perell (highly speculative but interesting)

Psychology/biology:

• “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment”, Le Texier2019

• “A Silent Childhood”, Rymer 1992_32ya (on the Genie child abuse case & origin of language; Genie’s cognitive profile—strong nonverbal skills, weak verbal/social—reminds me of chimpanzee vs children)

• “What the voice inside your head says about you: We tend to assume that our internal monologue ‘speaks’ in words—but it turns out that, for many of us, it’s much more complicated” (see also “Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking”, Hurlburt et al 2013_11ya; “The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults”, McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough 2011_13ya)

• Structured Procrastination

• “The Generative Adversarial Brain”, Gershman2019 (on the origins of psychiatric disorders)

• “Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering”, Qualia Computing

• “The Devil’s Bait: Symptoms, signs, and the riddle of Morgellons”; “Maybe It’s Lyme: What happens when illness becomes an identity?”

• “Developmental antecedents of achieved eminence”, Simonton1987

• “The Efficacy of Modafinil as a Cognitive Enhancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, Kredlow et al 2019

• “Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days’ duration”, Stewart & Fleming1973

Technology:

• “Atchafalaya”, John McPhee 1987_37ya (on the Old River Control Structure & ultimately doomed attempt to keep the Mississippi River in place)

• “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”

• “Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law”

• “Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone”, Kwong et al 2019

• “The Road to Clarity” (on the creation of the since-controversial Clearview highway font)

Economics:

• “The Launch: Inside the ‘largest launch of a produce item in American history’” (more on apple breeding & selling: the Cosmic Crisp apple; finally became available in my area in late 2020—I thought they were decent enough, pretty, but too sweet and uncompetitively priced compared to Honeycrisp/SweeTango)

• “Bayesian Persuasion and Information Design”, Kamenica2019

• “Can You Indemnify Against Dick Pics? The rise of scandal insurance in Hollywood”

Philosophy:

• “Consider the Lobster: For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more”, David Foster Wallace 2004

Fiction:

• “A science fiction writer of the Fifties”, Brad Leithauser 2006

• “How a Literary Prank Convinced Germany That ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Was Real: A 1963_61ya book purported to prove that the siblings were murderous bakers”

Misc:

• “An Inside Look at the Surprisingly Violent Quidditch World Cup”

Books

Fiction:

• Curves and Angles, Brad Leithauser (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Gone with the Wind (1939_85ya; review)

• Shin Godzilla (2016; review)