June 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on dysgenics, genetics, AI, PC history, and 5 movie reviews
This is the June 2017 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, May 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
Media
Links
Genetics
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Quantifying the impact of rare and ultra-rare coding variation across the phenotypic spectrum”, et al 2017
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“Discovery Of The First Genome-Wide Statistically-Significant Risk Loci For ADHD”, et al 2017
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“Environmental factors dominate over host genetics in shaping human gut microbiota composition”, et al 2017 ( commentary; “biome-explainability”—a rare use of variance components to check whether there is even a needle in the haystack)
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Recent Evolution:
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dysgenics:
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disease mutation load: “The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins”, et al 2017 ( media; +35% percentile increase in general disease risks over past ~millennia?)
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selection against education in the UK: “Signatures of negative selection in the genetic architecture of human complex traits”, et al 2018
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“Detecting polygenic adaptation in admixture graphs”, et al 2017 (No sign of selection is found for Europeans, but if I understand the method right, it’s only looking at net selection with time steps corresponding to populations branching. So given the European pattern of selection for intelligence at least up until agriculture and then heavy recent dysgenics against education/intelligence, those might mostly cancel compared to an East Asian population like Japan which started later.)
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Engineering:
AI
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“Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences”, et al 2017 (blogs: 1, 2)
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“Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks”, et al 2017
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“A simple neural network module for relational reasoning”, et al 2017 ( blog)
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“One Model To Learn Them All”, et al 2017 (a single NN for multi-modal tasks: from image classification to image captioning to English parsing to English⟺German⟺French translation)
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“Attention Is All You Need” for SOTA machine translation, et al 2017
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“Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues”, et al 2017 ( blog)
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“Learning to Learn from Noisy Web Videos”, et al 2017
Statistics/Meta-Science
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“Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”
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“Measurement Error, Regression to the Mean, and Group Differences” (Kelley’s paradox is a bitter one)
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“What works in e-commerce—a meta-analysis of 6700 online experiments”, 2017 (Informative priors: most A/B experiments fail and the successful ones have small effects on the order of a few % at most. Note the implications that most successful, in the sense of p < 0.05, A/B tests will grossly overestimate the true effect size; detecting realistic effects may require large sample sizes; and some categories of tests may well not be worth running at all. It would also be interesting to know how many of those nulls were based on correlational data…)
Politics/religion
Psychology/biology
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“Does High Self-esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?”, et al 2003; “The Man Who Destroyed America’s Ego: How a rebel psychologist challenged one of the 20th century’s biggest—and most dangerous—ideas”; “‘It was quasi-religious’: the great self-esteem con”
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“Lithium in Drinking Water and Incidence of Suicide: A Nationwide Individual-Level Cohort Study with 22 Years of Follow-Up”, et al 2017 (a major blow to the lithium hypothesis)
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“Where do hypotheses come from?”, et al 2017
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“My déjà vu is so extreme I can’t tell what’s real any more”
Technology
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“Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning”, De 2003 / ITA Software (Airline ticket search is not just NP-hard or worse, but undecidable.)
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“Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers”, et al 2010 (“…GWP profiles revealed that the
zlib
library accounted for nearly 5% of all CPU cycles consumed…”)
Economics
The Digital Antiquarian
On PC gaming history. Jimmy Maher has an excellent blog on working & playing his way through the early computing industry as it impinged on gaming, covering the wild ferment of the times, D&D, the European scenes, the economic backstabbing, game creators and studios’ swift rises & even swifter falls, and everything (often benefiting from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives).
There are many curious parts of gaming/computing history: for example, there is a striking prevalence of mtf (but not ftm) transsexuals; and exemplifying the chaos, it’s hard to identify any thing that people consistently got wrong—for every tactic that worked brilliantly one time & place, there appears to be an equal & opposite failure elsewhere. For one 1980s company, a foray into business software doomed it, while the same pivot works out brilliantly for another who is still around; one company dominates the market by leaping boldly onto a cutting-edge new system, while another bets the wrong way & dies or blows the revenue from its hit & is left scrambling; one company unwisely abandons the cash cow of older systems, while another reaps cash flow from obsolete microcomputers until it’s too late. The industry bet on computers rather than video game consoles looks like genius—right up until Nintendo invades. Many companies profit massively from selling hardware and commoditizing licensed OSes or software, unless they are IBM/Microsoft and it works out the other way etc. Given the sheer number of computer & video game platforms, people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs come off as having been both inevitable & far more lucky than good. (See also my review of Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.)
Many posts are worth the read:
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Britain’s occult uncle: Dennis Wheatley; “The Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers”; Deadline, first real-time text adventure: 1, 2, 3, 4
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“Free Fall, Part 2: Murder on the Zinderneuf”: procedurally generated mysteries
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The Hobbit: dynamic video game worlds
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the vicious UK computer market: “The Spectrum”, “The Commodore 64”, “Business is War”
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the UK market continued and the great PC industry crash: “This Tormented Business”: 1, 2, 3; “Acorn and Amstrad”
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early Apple: Apple II; “Shiny and Exciting vs. Dull and Boring”; “Seeing Farther”; “The Macintosh”
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the genesis of CD-ROMs: “The Dawn of Multimedia”, “The Laser Craze”; “A Slow-Motion Revolution”
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Michael Crichton: “From Congo to Amazon”, “Amazon in Pictures”
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The painful genesis of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure
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the odd origins of Rare: “The Legend of Ultimate Play The Game”
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“Of Wizards And Bards”: Wizardry giving way to The Bard’s Tale
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Ultima: “The Road to Ultima IV”, Ultima IV; “The Road to Ultima IV”, Ultima V
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The Case of the Amiga: “Lorraine”, “Jack Tramiel Is Back”, “We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up”, “Rock Lobster”
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Sid Meier: “MicroProse’s Simulation-Industrial Complex (or, The Ballad of Sid and Wild Bill)”, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon
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LucasArts: “Fractal Dreamers”, “A Habitat in Cyberspace”, “SCUMM”
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Pirates vs early DRM: “Don’t Copy That Floppy”, “The Scene”, “Case Studies in Copy Protection”
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D&D: “Opening the Gold Box, Part 2: 10 Odd Years at TSR”, “The Ambush at Sheridan Springs”
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Edward Mannock: “A Working-Class Hero”: “Proletariat, Prisoner, and Pilot”, “Bloody April”, “Ace and Tactician”, “A Hero’s Legacy”: Wings
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early patent trolls: “Mediagenic (or, The Patent from Hell)”: The Baer Patent on All Games
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“A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 5: The Inflection Point” (The extraordinary Soviet triple cross that restored their control over the Tetris franchise and royalties.)
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“Games on the Mersey, Part 5: The Lemmings Effect” (on the creation of Lemmings)
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“Doing Windows”: “MS-DOS and Its Discontents”, “From Interface Manager to Windows”, “A Pair of Strike-Outs”, “The Rapprochement”, “A Second Try”, “Look and Feel”, “Third Time’s the Charm”, “The Outsiders”, “Windows Comes Home”
Film/TV
Live-Action
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L.A. Confidential (one of the best noir films; Exley is particularly interesting as neither hero nor anti-hero)
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8 1⁄2 (a lame waste of time; not remotely funny nor insightful nor rendered sufficiently interesting by the now-exotic setting of 1960s Catholic Italy, as the making of 8 1⁄2 is Fellini’s excuse for making 8 1⁄2 in a third-rate breaking-the-fourth-wall exercise)
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Annie Hall (a few one-liners aside, Woody Allen’s neurotic humor is unbearable to watch. It would seem that Allen movies are not for me.)
Music
Touhou
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“冬中火葬” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
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“人別離苦” (PIROPARU; Send_Off {C80}) [folk]
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“廃獄のロア” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
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“揺籃曲 -Pure Japanese Ver.-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
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“Aisya -ye ru amma-” (Cororo feat. Sara Matsumoto; Edis revir -Riverside vocal best album & ryuno’s art works vol.1- {R8}) [folk]
Doujin
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“Kemono Friends BGM” (Kou Ogata; {2017}) [Celtic]