2015 News
This is the 201511ya summary edition of the Gwern.net newsletter (archives), summarizing the best of the monthly 201511ya newsletters:
Previously: 2015.
Writings
Media
Links
2015 saw two important fields continue their abrupt surge, going from strength to strength: genetics (behavioral genetics in particular) and AI. The pace of progress was dizzying, with, it seemed, each month bringing major results to the point where it drowned out important news from other fields and made it difficult to pick just 10; for example, who has time to note a major milestone in cryonics like proof of preservation of long-term memory in C. elegans when CRISPR is increasing in power on a monthly basis and researchers are offhandedly producing feats like myostatin-enhanced beagles or “micropigs” that would have been major R&D efforts just years ago? And the flood of deep learning results has continued to the point where end-of-year roundups of major breakthroughs accidentally omit discoveries like MSR’s residual networks which enable powerful neural networks with literally hundreds of layers to be trained? As Karpathy put it: “BatchNorm, STN, DCGAN, DRAW, soft/hard attention, char-rnn, DeepDream, NeuralStyle, TensorFlow, ResNet, AlphaGo… a lot happened over 1 year.” Not to mention behavioral genetics’ findings being repeatedly vindicated in large-scale genetic studies, confuting the critics, but also going further and making surprising new discoveries like a pervasive web of genetic correlations between intelligence and many other traits; population genetics in general is increasingly finding that there are meaningful differences between even closely related populations, indicating the important of ‘soft selection sweeps’ and the cumulative effect of small differences on many genes, which have lead to changes as large as domestication. And based on just January 2016’s news in both areas, it seems that 201511ya will not be exceptional but marks a new normal for these two areas and we can look forward to many exciting new results consolidating & extending 201511ya.
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
“Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies”, Polderman et al 2015
“Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome”, Hall et al 2015
intelligence:
“Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n = 53949)”, Davies et al 2015
“Polygenic Influence on Educational Attainment: New Evidence From the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health”, Domingue et al 2015
pervasive cross-correlations of polygenic scores for various traits: particularly Krapohl et al 2015
“Systems genetics identifies a convergent gene network for cognition and neurodevelopmental disease”, Johnson et al 2015
“Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children’s intelligence”, Trzaskowski et al 2014
Recent Evolution (Soft selection sweeps/group differences):
“Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians”, Mathieson et al 201511ya (media)
“Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe”, Robinson et al 2015
“Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication”, Carneiro et al 201412ya (the power of selection—complex behaviors influenced by many small changes)
“Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication”, Montague et al 201412ya (commentary)
AI
“Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition”, He et al 2015
“End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies”, Levine et al 201511ya (demo; talk)
“Actor-Mimic: Deep Multitask and Transfer Reinforcement Learning”, Parisotta et al 2015
“End-To-End Memory Networks”, Sukhbaatar et al 2015
“Generating Images from Captions With Attention”, Mansimov et al 2015
“Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks”, Radford et al 2015
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”
Statistics/meta-Science
“Compliance with Results Reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov”, Anderson et al 2015
“A survey of Bayesian predictive methods for model assessment, selection and comparison”, Vehtari & Ojanen
“How One Man Poisoned a City’s Water Supply (and Saved Millions of Children’s Lives in the Process)” (on John L. Leal & water chlorination)
“Empirical evidence of bias in treatment effect estimates in controlled trials with different interventions and outcomes: meta-epidemiological study”, Wood et al 2008
“Probable Points and Credible Intervals, Part 2: Decision Theory” (Bayesian search theory/optimization)
“The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research”, Freedman et al 2015
“The Mystery Machine: End-to-end Performance Analysis of Large-scale Internet Services”
Psychology/biology
“CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes”, Liang et al 201511ya; can be considered a followup to “Clinical outcome of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing”, Tan et al 2014
“Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans”, Vita-More & Barranco 2015
“Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry”, Markram et al 201511ya (media)
“A 2-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of Human Caloric Restriction: Feasibility and Effects on Predictors of Health Span and Longevity” (the CALERIE study), Ravussin et al 2015
“A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”, Pellegrino et al 2014
“Artificial Selection on Relative Brain Size in the Guppy Reveals Costs and Benefits of Evolving a Larger Brain”, Kotrschal et al 2013
“Synchronizing education to adolescent biology: ‘let teens sleep, start school later’”, Kelley et al 201412ya:
“Evolution of the human brain: when bigger is better”, Hofman 2014
Politics/religion
“The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics”, Abrahms 2013
“How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist”
“Misperceiving Inequality”, Gimpelson & Treisman 201511ya (excerpts)
“Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It”, Langbein 1979
“Proving communal warfare among hunter-gatherers: The quasi-Rousseau-an error”, Gat 2015
Technology
“If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?”
“Epigrams in Programming”, Alan Perlis 1982
“Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons”, MacKenzie & Spinardi 1995
“The Tail at Scale”, Dean & Barroso 2013
“The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”, 2001
“Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”, Koomey et al 2011
“Crush Point: When large crowds assemble, is there a way to keep them safe?”
“1 to 10 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy”
Economics
“Economic Gains Resulting from the Reduction in Children’s Exposure to Lead in the United States”, Grosse et al 2002
“Costs and benefits of iodine supplementation for pregnant women in a mildly to moderately iodine-deficient population: a modeling analysis” (excerpts)
“Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem”, Soska & Christin 201511ya (excerpts)
“The financing of jihadi terrorist cells in Europe”, Oftedal 2015
Children are net losses to parents, even in peasant or hunter-gatherer societies.
Philosophy
“When Do Extraordinary Claims Give Extraordinary Evidence?”, Hanson 2007
“Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?”, Tomasik 2014
“‘Ethics’ is advertising”, “The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield”
“The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?”, Hanson 1998
“The time resolution of the St Petersburg paradox”, Peters 2011
Fiction
“Extracts from the Club Diary” (Stross; Coffee steampunk, Mars, the end of the world) & “It Was All For The Tuna”
“Birdless Country”, by Burton Watson
“Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets”, Salganik & Watts 2009
“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”, Hughes et al 2012
“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, Borges 1951
Books
Fiction
Still Alice (our obituaries)
A Perfect Vacuum, Lem
The Martian (Weir)
Ready Player One, Cline 2011
The Wind-up Girl
Nonfiction
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Schlosser
Bias in Mental Testing, Jensen 1980
A History of Life Extensionism, Stambler 2014
Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients., on Christopher Murray’s Global Burden of Disease
Do No Harm, Marsh (elegantly written and moving neurosurgeon memoir on the theme of iatrogenics; I did disagree with his comments on the cost-benefit of operating in one case, though)
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, Popper
TV/movies
Nonfiction movies:
Fiction
Anime
Monogatari Second Season: Nekomonogatari+Kabukimongatari+Otorimonogatari+Onimonogatari+Koimonogatari