This is the 2015 summary edition of the Gwern.net newsletter (archives), summarizing the best of the monthly 2015 newsletters:
Previously: 2015.
Writings
- Dark Net Market (DNM) archives, 2011–2015
- When Does The Mail Come? A subjective Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times
- DNM arrests census
- metformin for life-extension: cost-benefit analysis
- Dysgenics power analysis: how much genetic data would it take to falsify such claims?
- “Silk Goxed: How DPR used MtGox for hedging & lost big”
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 2015 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 2015.
Genetics
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies”, et al 2015
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“Genetics and the placebo effect: the placebome”, et al 2015
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intelligence:
- “Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n = 53949)”, et al 2015
- “Polygenic Influence on Educational Attainment: New Evidence From the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health”, et al 2015
- “Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence”
- pervasive cross-correlations of polygenic scores for various traits: particularly et al 2015
- “Systems genetics identifies a convergent gene network for cognition and neurodevelopmental disease”, et al 2015
- “Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children’s intelligence”, et al 2014
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Recent Evolution (Soft selection sweeps/group differences):
- “Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians”, et al 2015 (media)
- “Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe”, et al 2015
- “Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication”, et al 2014 (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”, et al 2014 (commentary)
AI
- “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition”, et al 2015
- “End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies”, et al 2015 (demo; talk)
- “On Learning to Think: Algorithmic Information Theory for Novel Combinations of Reinforcement Learning Controllers and Recurrent Neural World Models”
- “What my deep model doesn’t know…”
- “Actor-Mimic: Deep Multitask and Transfer Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2015
- “End-To-End Memory Networks”, et al 2015
- “Generating Images from Captions With Attention”, et al 2015
- “Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2015
- “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”
- “The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine”
Statistics/meta-science
- “The Bayesian Reproducibility Project”
- “Compliance with Results Reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov”, 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)
- “Correlation, Causation, and Confusion”
- “The Non-parametric Bootstrap as a Bayesian Model”
- “Empirical evidence of bias in treatment effect estimates in controlled trials with different interventions and outcomes: meta-epidemiological study”, et al 2008
- “Probable Points and Credible Intervals, Part 2: Decision Theory” (Bayesian search theory/optimization)
- “The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research”, 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”, et al 2015; can be considered a followup to “Clinical outcome of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing”, et al 2014
- “Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans”, Vita-2015
- “Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry”, et al 2015 (media)
- “A 2-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of Human Caloric Restriction: Feasibility and Effects on Predictors of Health Span and Longevity” (the CALERIE study), et al 2015
- “A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”, et al 2014
- “The myopia boom: Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason why”
- “Artificial Selection on Relative Brain Size in the Guppy Reveals Costs and Benefits of Evolving a Larger Brain”, et al 2013
- “Synchronizing education to adolescent biology: ‘let teens sleep, start school later’”, et al 2014:
- “Evolution of the human brain: when bigger is better”, 2014
- “The Trip Treatment: Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results”
Politics/religion
- “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare”
- “The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics”, 2013
- “What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control”
- “How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist”
- “Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.”
- “Misperceiving Inequality”, 2015 (excerpts)
- “Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It”, 1979
- “The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”
- “Proving communal warfare among hunter-gatherers: The quasi-Rousseau-an error”, 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”, Mac1995
- “The Tail at Scale”, 2013
- “The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”, 2001
- “Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”, et al 2011
- “How Much of the Web Is Archived?”
- “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”
- “Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid for Tor-Breaking Research”
Economics
- “Economic Gains Resulting from the Reduction in Children’s Exposure to Lead in the United States”, et al 2002
- “Costs and benefits of iodine supplementation for pregnant women in a mildly to moderately iodine-deficient population: a modelling analysis” (excerpts)
- “Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem”, 2015 (excerpts)
- “Overkill: An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?”
- “A colorful history of progress”
- “The financing of jihadi terrorist cells in Europe”, 2015
- “The Bonsai Kid”
- “Brickyard Blues: Numbed by cold, pelted by rain, enduring smashed fingers and toes, poorly paid brick salvagers keep coming back for more”
- Children are net losses to parents, even in peasant or hunter-gatherer societies.
- Arab slave trade
Philosophy
- “When Do Extraordinary Claims Give Extraordinary Evidence?”, 2007
- “Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?”, 2014
- “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo”
- “The Reversal Test and Status Quo Bias”
- “‘Ethics’ is advertising”, “The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield”
- “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?”, 1998
- “The time resolution of the St Petersburg paradox”, 2011
- “The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”
- “A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop”
Fiction
- “The Cambist and Lord Iron” (discussion)
- “Extracts from the Club Diary” (Stross; Coffee steampunk, Mars, the end of the world) & “It Was All For The Tuna”
- Friendship is Optimal
- “Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person”
- “Birdless Country”, by Burton Watson
- “Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets”, 2009
- “E unibus pluram: Television And U.S. Fiction”
- “Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature”, et al 2012
- “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, Borges 1951
- “Biases of Fiction”
Books
Fiction
- Still Alice (our obituaries)
- The Fractal Prince & The Causal Angel
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
- A Perfect Vacuum, Lem
- The Martian (Weir)
- Ready Player One, 2011
- The Wind-up Girl
Nonfiction
- Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Schlosser
- Bias in Mental Testing, 1980
- Life in Our Phage World
- A History of Life Extensionism, 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
- Practical Criticism, I.A. Richards 1930
TV/movies
Nonfiction movies:
Fiction
Anime
- Cowboy Bebop
- Mushishi Zoku Shou
- Hozuki no Reitetsu
- Expelled from Paradise (review)
- Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun
- Shirobako (review)
- Monogatari Second Season: Nekomonogatari+Kabukimongatari+Otorimonogatari+Onimonogatari+Koimonogatari
- Fate/stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works