August 2016 News
This is the August 2016 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, July 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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Recent Evolution:
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“Divergent Ah receptor ligand selectivity during hominin evolution”, et al 2016 (Evolution to tolerate smoke poisoning, 350–45kya)
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“Genetic Markers of Human Evolution Are Enriched in Schizophrenia”, et al 2016 (Our evolution is not yet complete: evolution is still working out the kinks. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for it to finish the job.)
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“Genetic Associations Between Personality Traits and Lifetime Reproductive Success in Humans”, et al 2016 (contemporary selection for personality traits)
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“How cognitive genetic factors influence fertility outcomes: A mediational SEM analysis”, et al 2016 (More on dysgenics in the USA: mostly mediated through education’s effects on fertility.)
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“Rapid evolutionary response to a transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils”, et al 2016 (quick evolution through soft selection sweeps)
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Phenome-wide Heritability Analysis of the UK Biobank”, et al 2016 ( SNP heritability for 551 complex traits)
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“Associations between Polygenic Risk for Psychiatric Disorders and Substance Involvement”, et al 2016
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“Genetic Prediction of Male Pattern Baldness”, et al 2016 (baldness GCTA of 52%, and GWAS with 250 new hits from the UK Biobank.)
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“Sweet Taste Perception is Associated with Body Mass Index at the Phenotypic and Genotypic Level”, et al 2016
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“Analysis of Intellectual Disability Copy Number Variants for Association With Schizophrenia”, et al 2016 (more on the pervasive genetic overlap between mental illnesses/intellectual problems)
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Politics/religion:
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“Evolution is Not Relevant to Sex Differences in Humans Because I Want it That Way! Evidence for the Politicization of Human Evolutionary Psychology”, 2016 (academia, liberalism, and propensity to blank slate beliefs like believing hens & roosters differ due to nurture)
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“Science Is Not Always ‘Self-Correcting’: Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence”, 2015 (scientific endorsement of the Noble Lie)
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“The Drugs Won: The Case for Ending the Sports War on Doping”
AI:
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“Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients”, et al 2016 ( DeepMind explainer; potentially allows for extreme parallelization of neural nets across GPUs)
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“Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?”, 2016 (Tegmark tries to explain from a physics perspective why deep learning works.)
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“Densely Connected Convolutional Networks”, et al 2016 (A new twist on highway/residual/fractal networks, with further records set on image tasks.)
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“How To Save Mankind From The New Breed of Killer Robots” (Tool AIs want to become agent AIs.)
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“Apprenticeship learning using Inverse Reinforcement Learning”
Statistics/meta-science:
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“How Multiple Imputation Makes a Difference”, 2016 (many political science results biased & driven by treatment of missing data)
Psychology/biology:
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“Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes”, et al 2016 (Terrifyingly large within-family estimates, and the risk increases with age in adolescence.)
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“Heads or tails: the impact of a coin toss on major life decisions and subsequent happiness”, 2020 (You can randomize anything if you’re sufficiently clever about it—even having babies, quitting jobs, moving, or starting a business. Arguably, like computer chess or ‘comfort zone expansion’, this suggests humans may be too risk-averse: the people on the margin, the 6% who apparently could be swayed by a coin flip, should be making these decisions more often, suggesting a bias towards the status quo.)
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“The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments”, et al 2016 (Many traits are stable. Migrants aren’t going to become more patient, intelligent, peaceful, pro-capitalism, or long-term oriented just because they’ve immigrated to your country.)
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“To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep”, Gillen-et al 2013
Technology:
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“Strategy Letter V” (Reminder: Android vs iPhone, Oculus vs Vive, Microsoft vs Apple, Facebook vs media, Twitter vs API users, Amazon vs anything—everything in SV is ruled by ‘commoditize your complement’ and low marginal costs.)
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“DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with a Malicious Proof-of-Work”, Wustrow & Vander2016 (Who knew HTTPS connections could provide third-party-verifiable signatures and so HTTPS is a valid Proof-of-Work and one can incentivize creating HTTPS connections and hence DDoSes?)
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“Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?”, Salah2012
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“Learnable Programming: Designing a programming system for understanding programs”
Economics:
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“The Case Against Everyone’s Favorite Tax Break: The Mortgage Interest Deduction”
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“Fair Division of Black-Hole Negentropy: an Introduction to Cooperative Game Theory”
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“Open-access deal for particle physics: Consortium brokers agreement with 12 journals”
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“Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already?”
Philosophy:
Fiction:
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The Mongolian Wizard: “Day of the Kraken”, Michael Swanwick
Misc:
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“Detailed Discussion of Legal Rights and Duties in Lost Pet Disputes”, Berry 201014ya (lost/abandoned pets are surprisingly complex legally)
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“What was it like to try a rat? (Comparative Jurisprudence, part 1)”, Ewald 199529ya (part 2 is not about animal trials at all, unfortunately)
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Tendril perversion (An uncommon name for a common phenomenon; investigated by no less than Charles Darwin.)
Books
Nonfiction:
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Fortune’s Formula, Poundstone 200519ya (review)
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The Future of Machine Intelligence: Perspectives from Leading Practitioners, ed 2016 (short 80pg ebook of interviews with ML experts; some are notable, like Ilya Sutskever, some much less so (an evolutionary computation guy? what has that field done in years?) but all interviews are so short, ~5 pages, that they hardly get into any depth, and it’s a waste of time.)
Film/TV
Live-action:
Anime:
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The Dog of Flanders (a classic anime children’s movie; aside from the unusual Belgian setting, not too much to recommend it for adults—cardboard characters and almost excruciatingly slow, with a few missteps like failing to establish chronology so the main character’s eviction “by Christmas” comes as a total surprise because the viewer still thinks it’s autumn)