This is the March 2017 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, February 2017 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
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Gwern.net: HTTPS now mandatory; HTML sections rewritten using HTML5 semantic markup for better compatibility with screen readers & offline browsers like Instapaper/Pocket; “importance” metadata added to all pages to rank them; “belief” metadata renamed more intuitively as “confidence”; finish adding 301 Redirects for all broken links & common typos; renamed & all darknet market pages for current terminology; rewrote Patreon profile
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Psychiatric Genomics: An Update and an Agenda”, et al 2017
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“Genetic Variation in the Social Environment Contributes to Health and Disease”, et al 2017 (where does culture come from?)
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“Genome-Wide Analysis Of 113,968 Individuals In UK Biobank Identifies Four Loci Associated With Mood Instability”, et al 2017 (UK Biobank, the gift that keeps on giving; continuing the themes of “everything is heritable” and “abnormal is normal”)
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“Genetic overlap between schizophrenia and developmental psychopathology: a longitudinal approach applied to common childhood disorders between age 7 and 15 years”, et al 2016 (more generalized psychiatric genetic risk)
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Recent Evolution:
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“Excess of genomic defects in a woolly mammoth on Wrangel island”, 2017 (media; consequences of increasing genetic load: mutational meltdown. Did this finish off the last population of woolly mammoths?)
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“Selective sweep analysis using village dogs highlights the pivotal role of the neural crest in dog domestication”, et al 2017 (More on complex intellectual changes in higher mammals due to recent evolution due to soft sweeps: dog physical & behavioral domestication is due to a lot of small recent genetic changes. Evolution doesn’t stop at the neck.)
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“Selection in Europeans on Fatty Acid Desaturases Associated with Dietary Changes”, et al 2017 (More on recent human evolution with large between-country differences due to local adaptations.)
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Engineering:
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“CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human zygotes using Cas9 protein”, et al 2017 (no off-target mutations and efficiencies of 20/50/100% for various edits. As I predicted, the older papers, et al 2015 / et al 2016 / et al 2016, were not state-of-the-art and would be improved on considerably.)
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AI:
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Nvidia announces the 1080ti GPU (Titan replacement at $852.43$7002017)
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“Deep Learning Reinvents the Hearing Aid: Finally, wearers of hearing aids can pick out a voice in a crowded room” (If anything, the audio samples sound too good to be true.)
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“The Shattered Gradients Problem: If resnets are the answer, then what is the question?”, et al 2017 (successfully training 198-layer non-resnet fully-connected NNs w/better initialization; apparently residual networks were never necessary—humans just have no idea how to train neural networks…)
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“Neural Episodic Control”, et al 2017 ( commentary)
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“Parallel Multiscale Autoregressive Density Estimation”, et al 2017 (Generating 512px photorealistic images & video with PixelCNNs rather than GANs)
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“Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks”, et al 2017 (Unclear how CycleGAN, released a few days later, differs. See also pix2px; To quote the Reddit summary: “DiscoGANs—Answering the age old question: What would your face look like if it were actually a car.” Paging Dr Hofstadter…)
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“Evolving Deep Neural Networks”, et al 2017
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“Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers”, et al 2017 (grossly inefficient and hobbled in some ways but still cool)
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“Network Morphism”, et al 2016 (A nice inspiration from category theory. I wish I saw this out in the wild, because it would speed up architecture and hyperparameter optimization immeasurably if we didn’t have to keep starting from scratch with every model.)
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“On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines”, et al 2017; “G.K. Chesterton on AI Risk”
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“Meta-assessment of bias in science”, et al 2017
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“Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research”, 2012
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“Mind-hack: the Lehmer mental math pseudo-random number generators”: “An RNG that runs in your brain”
Politics/religion:
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“The System that Wasn’t There: Ayn Rand’s Failed Philosophy (and why it matters)”
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“The Dark Enlightenment”, Nick Land
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“Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception”, 1986
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“Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency’s Headlines”
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“The Strange Rise and Fall of North Korea’s Business Empire in Japan”
Psychology/biology:
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The Flexner Report
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“Who Buried Paul?” (A fun retrospective on the “Paul McCartney is actually dead” Beatles conspiracy theory which, if you’re like me, you’ve never heard of before but was apparently quite a thing. Featuring conspiracy theorists literally connecting the dots and seeing stars.)
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“Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of ‘Far Transfer’: Evidence From a Meta-Analytic Review”, Melby-et al 2016
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“Why don’t all whales have cancer? A novel hypothesis resolving Peto’s paradox”, et al 2007
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“Total recall: the people who never forget: An extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory” (spaced repetition at work?)
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“Will 90yo Become The New 60yo? As our lifespans have increased, so too have our active years. Can that go on?” (gerontology & compression of morbidity)
Technology:
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“Don’t Worry—It Can’t Happen”, Harrington, Scientific American 1940
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“Compromising connectivity: information dynamics between the state and society in a digitizing North Korea”, et al 2017
The details on NK use of digital censorship is interesting: steady progress in locking down Bluetooth and WiFi by software and then hardware modifications; use of Android security system/DRM to install audit logs + regular screenshots to capture foreign media consumption; a whitelist/signed-media system to block said foreign media from ever being viewed, with auto-deletion of offending files; watermarking (courtesy of an American university’s misguided outreach) of media created on desktops to trace them; network blocking and surveillance; and efforts towards automatic bulk surveillance of text messages for ‘South-Korean-style’ phrases/words. Stallman’s warnings about DRM are quite prophetic in the NK context—the system is secured against the user… For these reasons & poverty, radio (including foreign radios like Voice of America) is—surprisingly to me—the top source of information for North Koreans.
Economics:
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“Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money”
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“In Search of the Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex”
Fiction:
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The Birds (Took second place; “One of the greatest of Euripides’s surviving works, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that came in first.”)
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
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10 Cloverfield Lane (I was fortunate enough to forget entirely what this movie was about in between downloading & watching, and it kept me in suspense and surprised me, particularly with the ending. I appreciated the genre-savvy and competent female lead. A good psychological suspense/horror movie.)
Animated:
Music
Touhou:
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“Twice” (Tim Vegas feat. millie; TWICE {C91}) [Jpop]
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“視的領域-My Territory-” (kirin feat. miko; Ironic Relation {C91}) [trance]
Kancolle:
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“にゃしぃにゃしぃわ~るど” (ぺた; rikka {C91}) [electronic]
Doujin:
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“Call Of Sea” (Osanzi; 東京クリーチャーガール {C91}) [electronic]
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“One’s Off Hours” (Alinut; WINTER STILLNESS {C91}) [trance]
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“Snow Crystal” (P*light; Decoratorz {C91}) [trance]
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“Blue Momentary” (Nago; KALEIDOSCOPE DIVER {C91}) [trance]
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“Myxa” (siqlo; snowflakes {C91}) [trance]
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“Yukibare” (Keisuke Kimura; snowflakes {C91}) [electronic]
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“soft groove” (Conures; snowflakes {C91}) [electronic]