September 2016 News
This is the September 2016 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, August 2016. This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
If you have not been receiving issues, please check your email account’s spam folder. (Gmail in particular has been flagging as spam.)
Writings
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Genome-wide association study of antisocial personality disorder”, et al 2016 ( GWAS hits on crime)
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“The Causal Effects of Education on Health, Mortality, Cognition, Well-being, and Income in the UK Biobank”, et al 2016
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“Shared genetic aetiology of puberty timing between sexes and with health-related outcomes”, et al 2015 (Most correlations are bad, as predicted by life cycle theory.)
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“Evidence that low socioeconomic position accentuates genetic susceptibility to obesity”, et al 2016
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Politics/religion:
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“‘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.)
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“The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11”, 2012
AI:
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“Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2016 ( video)
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“Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations”, et al 2016
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“Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network”, et al 2016
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“Hyper Networks”, et al 2016 ( blog)
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“Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold”, et al 2016b
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“Challenges for Brain Emulation: Why Is It So Difficult?”, 2012
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes”, et al 2008
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“Predicting Experimental Results: Who Knows What?”, Della2016
Psychology/biology:
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“Morphometricity as a measure of the neuroanatomical signature of a trait”, 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 et al 2018 , 2018, et al 2018 )
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“Treatment of Psychopathy: A Review of Empirical Findings”, 2006
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“How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Super-smart Children”
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“Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication”, et al 2016
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“Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal”, et al 2016
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“Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: rapid evolution of an introduced sexually transmitted disease?”, 2004
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“How to confuse a moral compass: Survey ‘magic trick’ causes attitude reversal”
Technology:
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“Capacity-approaching DNA storage”, 2016 (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!)
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“Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip”, 2012
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“Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling”, 2009
Economics:
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“Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny? How migration shapes the prosperity of countries”
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“When It Rains It Pours: The Long-run Economic Impacts of Salt Iodization in the United States”, et al 2016
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“Signaling and Productivity in the Private Financial Returns to Schooling”, 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.)
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“Good Policy or Good Luck? Country growth performance and temporary shocks”, et al 1993
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“Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client”
Philosophy:
Fiction:
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
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The Bridge to Lucy Dunn, Exurb1a (review)
Film/TV
Anime:
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Chirin no Suzu/Ringing Bell (review; the most Nietzschean of anime)