July 2016 News
This is the July 2016 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, June 2016. This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Predicting educational achievement from DNA”, et al 2016 ( supplement; polygenic scores now predict 3.5% of intelligence, 7% of family SES, and 9% of education)
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“Genetically-Mediated Associations Between Measures of Childhood Character and Academic Achievement”, Tucker-et al 2016
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“The continuing value of twin studies in the -omics era”, van et al 2012
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“Diagnoses in Siblings of Probands With Autism Spectrum Disorders”, Jokiranta-et al 2016 (see also “Different neurodevelopmental symptoms have a common genetic etiology”, Pettersson et al 201311ya)
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“Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence”, 2016 (Seems to overemphasize the role of common variants and underplay all the severe de novo mutations discovered in autism cases.)
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Recent Evolution:
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Engineering:
Politics/religion:
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“Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse”, Bennett 201311ya (I didn’t know many of those details about how the East German collapse was able to go so smoothly, or that Kim Jong-Il had intimidated his subordinates during the ’90s famines with footage of impoverished East German elites.)
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“How Successful Was Christianity?”, Carrier
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“Seeds of Doubt: An activist’s controversial crusade against genetically modified crops”
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“Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang
AI:
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“Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems”, et al 2016
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“Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection”, et al 2016 (Difficulty of a chess endgame position predicts mistakes far better than time constraints or chess ability. Not necessarily surprising—as chess AIs demonstrate, humans only span a fraction of the possible range of objective chess playing ability, so individual human differences in ability won’t matter much.)
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“Accelerating Eulerian Fluid Simulation With Convolutional Networks” (neural network all the things)
Statistics/meta-science:
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“Why It Took Social Science Years to Correct a Simple Error About ‘Psychoticism’”
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“Can Results-Free Review Reduce Publication Bias? The Results and Implications of a Pilot Study”, et al 2016 (on result-blind peer review)
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“Our Fathers of Old”, Rudyard Kipling
Psychology/biology:
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Do Portia spiders have a mind?, John McCrone 200618ya (commentary on Portia spiders)
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“New Drug Development: Estimating entry from human clinical trials”, 2003
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“The Efficacy of Psychological, Educational, and Behavioral Treatment: Confirmation From Meta-Analysis”, Lipsey & Wilson 199331ya (incidentally, published studies yield mean effects 0.14 SDs larger than unpublished studies.)
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“Genetically Engineering an Icon: Can Biotech Bring the Chestnut Back to America’s Forests?”
Technology:
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“The Slow Winter” (James Mickens)
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“Liking What You See: A Documentary”, by Ted Chiang
Economics:
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“The Emergence of an Informal Health-Care Sector in North Korea”, et al 2016
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“How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry”
Philosophy:
Fiction:
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There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, by Sam Hughes
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“Seventy-Two Letters”, by Ted Chiang
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“Equoid”, by Charles Stross
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“The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane”, by John Myers Myers (The fall of the Alamo, in alliterative verse.)
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“Suminoe Beach”, by Kuramochi Chitose (328-9; VI: 931-2)
The beach is beautiful; and there grow
The sea-tangles swaying,
Lapped by a thousand waves
In the calm of morning,
And by five hundred waves
In the evening calm.
O Suminoe Beach,
Where white-crested waves are racing around!
Could I weary of watching, not only now,
But day in, day out, over and over again,
As those waves break on the shore?Envoy
Let me go, with my clothes stained
For remembrance with the yellow clay
Of Suminoe’s shore, which white-crested waves
Visit, ceaselessly lapping! -
“Poverty”, by Moon Byung-ran
Books
Nonfiction:
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The Theory of Special Operations, McRaven 199232ya (review)
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The Genius Factory, Plotz 200519ya (review)
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Average is Over, Cowen 201311ya (review)
Fiction:
Film/TV
Anime:
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Zero Escape 3—Zero Time Dilemma (video game with positive review on LW and ANN I instead watched a YouTube 100% walkthrough of, skipping the room-escape puzzles. I watched the first few such puzzles but found them rather tedious-looking, so that’s definitely a reason to prefer watching Zero Time Dilemma to playing it. This way, ZTD can be considered an ultra-low-budget anime done using 3D CGI lasting perhaps 10 hours. The CGI itself is… not great, by any means, but one understands what’s going on, and it’s not quite as tedious as reading a visual novel like Umineko even if Umineko had much better 2D artwork. That leaves the story itself, which is ambitious SF, trying to work together time travel, parallel universes & shifting, the anthropic principle, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Sleeping Beauty problem, and amnesia drugs, in the framework of people trapped in a bomb shelter by a psychopathic mastermind. The ‘decisions’ made in each game provide a garden of forking paths the player navigates between to explore the consequences of particular choices, trying to navigate to a good end, where good is relative to the consequences of other possible universes. Eventually the characters themselves start understanding the situation and start shifting as well. Most choices end in death, so the exponential increase doesn’t get out of hand. Some of the plot twists are dramatic and surprised me—for example, the architecture twist surprised me because while I had wondered how they could all have access to the same exit elevator if they were sealed off, I never put the remaining pieces together. Probably I would’ve enjoyed it more if I had watched the previous games to get the backstory, but it was still a fun SF series. That said, I felt some of the story was half-baked and it did not work as well as Steins;gate: the characters do disappointingly little to work around the amnesia despite ample opportunity; I was surprised by the ending because although I had guessed Zero’s motive long before, at the anthropic principle/dice game, some of the events involving x-codes had seemed to specifically disconfirm it and the ultimate product seems kind of trivial compared to Zero’s efforts to obtain it; the availability of both sliding and a space-time teleporter felt inelegant and the possibilities underused; the revelation of who Zero is was a complete asspull which—shades of Umineko—relies on a ‘treachery of images’ trick which simply doesn’t work for both narrative & animation reasons, and worse, was unnecessary; and the narrative pacing is weak as the first part of the game spends what feels like an eternity on the repetitive starting Prisoner’s dilemma game and then rushes through the rest.)
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La Maison en Petits Cubes (a simple concept, similar to the later memory sequence in Pixar’s Up, but like Up, effective)
Music
Touhou:
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“Trojan Asteroid Jungle” (akikiki; {2015}) [classical]
Vocaloid:
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“Heliosphere” (Jizel {201311ya}; a tribute to the Voyager probes)