Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genome-wide association study of antisocial personality disorder”, Rautiainen et al 2016 (GWAS hits on crime)

  • “The Causal Effects of Education on Health, Mortality, Cognition, Well-being, and Income in the UK Biobank”, Davies et al 2016

  • “Shared genetic aetiology of puberty timing between sexes and with health-related outcomes”, Day et al 2015 (Most correlations are bad, as predicted by life cycle theory.)

  • “Genomic analyses for age at menarche identify 389 independent signals and indicate BMI-independent effects of puberty timing on cancer susceptibility”, Day et al 2016b

  • “Evidence that low socioeconomic position accentuates genetic susceptibility to obesity”, Tyrrell et al 2016

Politics/religion:

• “‘Superbug’ scourge spreads as U.S. fails to track rising human toll” (The weakness of US public health statistics on the spread of antibiotic resistance.)

• “The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules”, Rossi1987

• “The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11”, Mueller & Stewart2012

• “The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life”

• Malcolm X’s life of crime

AI:

• “WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio”

• “Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Zhu et al 2016 (video)

• “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations”, Covington et al 2016

• “Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network”, Ledig et al 2016

• “Hyper Networks”, Ha et al 2016 (blog)

• “Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold”, Zhu et al 2016b

• “Challenges for Brain Emulation: Why Is It So Difficult?”, Cattell & Parker2012

• NN architectures depicted graphically

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Saving Science: Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.”

• “Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes”, Ord et al 2008

• “Predicting Experimental Results: Who Knows What?”, DellaVigna & Pope2016

• “The Solution of the n-body Problem”, Diacu1996

• “If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?”

• /r/estimation

Psychology/biology:

• “Morphometricity as a measure of the neuroanatomical signature of a trait”, Sabuncu et al 2016 (Heritability/variance component estimation generalized to brain volume/thickness: demonstrates that total brain structure—as opposed to just the predictors estimated using underpowered samples, which can only predict like r = 0.3—can predict a large fraction of variance among Alzheimers & aging (~1), IQ (0.95), etc, and so those traits have causal relationships (of some sort) with brain volume/thickness. A common mistake in interpreting brain imaging studies is to argue that, since the state-of-the-art study can predict only a relatively small amount of a trait from their brain imaging data, neuroanatomy is not important; the fallacy here is to treat an extremely loose lower bound as being close to the true total value. By using variance components, however, the total can be directly estimated, and the true total turns out to be far larger. While the causal relationships may not turn out to be interesting (we already knew brain volumes and thicknesses are catastrophically affected by aging and Alzheimer’s), it does at least imply that as brain imaging datasets get larger, they will get ever better at predicting whether a subject has Alzheimers or how intelligent a person is. Hopefully we’ll see variance components taken seriously outside of genetics. If power analysis tells you whether you have enough light to find the needles in the haystack, variance components can tell you whether there are even any needles to look for. See also Seidlitz et al 2018, Bessadok & Rekik2018, Rincent et al 2018)

• “Treatment of Psychopathy: A Review of Empirical Findings”, Harris & Rice2006

• “How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Super-smart Children”

• “Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication”, Panero et al 2016

• “Failing Your Goals with Beeminder”

• “Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal”, Patitsas et al 2016

• “Thomas Jefferson Defends America With a Moose”

• “Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: rapid evolution of an introduced sexually transmitted disease?”, Knell2004

• “How to confuse a moral compass: Survey ‘magic trick’ causes attitude reversal”

• “Melatonin Treatment Effects on Adolescent Students’ Sleep Timing and Sleepiness in a Placebo-Controlled Crossover Study”, Eckerberg et al 2012

Technology:

• “Capacity-approaching DNA storage”, Erlich & Zielinski2016 (If DNA storage gets real-world usage, it might help accelerate the DNA synthesis cost-curve, and we could get whole genome synthesis years before I project!)

• “Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip”, Skorobogatov & Woods2012

• “Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling”, Wheeler2009

• “Turning 8-Bit Sprites into Printable 3D Models”

• “Magic: the Gathering is Turing Complete”

Economics:

• “Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny? How migration shapes the prosperity of countries”

• “When It Rains It Pours: The Long-run Economic Impacts of Salt Iodization in the United States”, Adhvaryu et al 2016

• “Signaling and Productivity in the Private Financial Returns to Schooling”, Bingley et al 2015 (As I’ve mentioned before, even if you aren’t all that interested in heritability or genetic correlations, twins and family studies are still vital for causal inference in economics/medicine/sociology because they control for so many things.)

• “China’s Gold Rush in the Hills of Appalachia: Buyers in Hong Kong and Beijing are paying top dollar for wild American ginseng, fueling a digging frenzy that could decimate the revered root for good”

• “Good Policy or Good Luck? Country growth performance and temporary shocks”, Easterly et al 1993

• Experience curve effects

• “Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client”

• “Lehman Brothers, We Heard You Were Dead”

Philosophy:

• “Logical Induction”, Garrabrant et al 2016

• “Not By Empathy Alone”

• “The Wisest Steel Man”

Fiction:

• Ted Chiang:

  • “Exhalation”

  • “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”

Books

Nonfiction:

• Modern Japanese Diaries, Donald Keene (review)

Fiction:

• The Bridge to Lucy Dunn, Exurb1a (review)

Film/TV

Anime:

• Chirin no Suzu/Ringing Bell (review; the most Nietzschean of anime)

• Soul Eater (review)