October 2017 News
October 2017 Gwern.net newsletter with links on heritability, AlphaGo Zero, peer review, gifted-and-talented; 1 book & 1 movie review.
This is the October 2017 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, September 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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fulltexted most of the Arthur Jensen bibliography by tracking down and jailbreaking/scanning ~153 papers/books/magazines/encyclopedia-articles
Media
Links
genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
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“Genome-wide meta-analysis associates HLA-DQA1/DRB1 and LPA and lifestyle factors with human longevity”, et al 2017; “Biological Insights Into Muscular Strength: Genetic Findings in the UK Biobank”, et al 2017
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“CNV-association meta-analysis in 191,161 European adults reveals new loci associated with anthropometric traits”, et al 2017 (Some interestingly large effects here.)
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“Genetic and Environmental Influences on Household Financial Distress”, et al 2017
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“‘Obedience to traditional authority’: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness”, Ludeke et al 201311ya; “Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement”, et al 2015
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One interesting bit of behavioral genetics: identical twin correlations are sometimes argued to be just because of how other people treat them based on their appearance. But we know this is false because of “look-alikes”: totally unrelated people who happen to look identical, nevertheless, are no more similar on personality or other measures. Nancy Segal has identified a number of look-alikes and discusses how they differ dramatically from identical twins: background/history, Segal 201311yaa, Segal et al 201311yab
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“Heritability of schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum based on the nationwide Danish Twin Register”, et al 2017 ( Measurement error due to censoring biases schizophrenia heritability down by 5%)
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“Cross-sectional association between soda consumption and BMI in a community-based sample of twins”, et al 2017 (Correlation is not causation: Fat people are more likely to drink soda, but the fatter twin in a pair is not more likely to drink soda; so soda/obesity appears to be largely confounded, perhaps by more generic eating or exercise tendencies)
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“Brain structure mediates the association between height and cognitive ability”, et al 2017
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“Why are children in the same family so different from one another?”, Plomin & Daniels 198737ya -“Genetic influences on measures of the environment: a systematic review”, Kendler & Baker 200618ya (The environment is genetic too.)
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Engineering:
AI:
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“Mastering The Game of Go without Human Knowledge”, et al 2017:
Detailed commentary; the final hurrah of the now-closed DM research programme, AlphaGo Zero is trained from scratch without any human data using pure self-play to truly superhuman levels of Go play, far surpassing AlphaGo Sedol, using an order of magnitude less computing power; the key ingredient appears to be a breakthrough in stabilizing self-play, by training the NN’s value estimates, each move, towards the value estimates as finetuned by a MCTS search. This provides improved estimates, but also (somehow?) manages to prevent catastrophic forgetting and provides incredibly stable self-play training. It may be clearer to read the independent invention of “Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search”, et al 2017, as well as “Learning Generalized Reactive Policies using Deep Neural Networks”, et al 2017. Self-play has been underused in deep RL because it is so hard to stabilize despite being a seductively general technique, and despite the limitation of requiring a MCTS-able setting, I think this may turn out to be a big breakthrough for deep RL, and perhaps in the long run more important than the original AlphaGo paper.
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“ProGAN: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation”, et al 2017 ( source; video; GANs generating photorealistic 1024x1024px faces, better than StackGAN++ This jumps right over the uncanny valley to, for many of these, I can no longer tell the difference)
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“PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing”, et al 2017 (GANs will be much slower than the rule-based or Markov chain generators currently used, but that matters less for long passwords where you can’t hope to brute force them normally and you rely on good guessing. Passwords were already dead, and this emphasizes it.)
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“Where’s Waldo, Terminator Edition” (finding Waldo in large images using image segmentation CNNs)
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“What does a convolutional neural network recognize in the moon?”, 2017
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How Buzzfeed used random forests & airplane data to find domestic US spy planes
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“‘Peer review’ is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?”; “Peer Review: The end of an error?”
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“Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, et al 2017 ( media)
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“The Number Of Killings In Southern Rural Norway, 1300–1569”, Kadane & Næshagen 201311ya (Unusual applications of capture-recapture statistics.)
Politics/religion:
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“Randomized Controlled Trial of the Metropolitan Police Department Body-Worn Camera Program”/“A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations” (A large pre-registered randomized trial of police bodycams shows tiny effects at best despite promising initial results in other places & experiments. Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero”; the Stainless Steel Law: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”)
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“The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics”
Psychology/biology:
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“The limitations of the backfire effect”, 2017 (the “backfire effect” apparently picks up its 4th failure to replicate.)
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“Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not?”, 2017
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“Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory”, 2010
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“Promethea Unbound” (The strange and unfortunate saga of a child prodigy; also illustrates the curse of curiosity, lack of ambition, and ‘culture of poverty’.)
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“Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels”, et al 2017 (If you are wondering—for signaling purposes—which genres correlate the most with the generally perceived as “healthy” personality dimensions (low Neuroticism, high Agreeableness/Extraversion/Openness/Conscientiousness), that would seem to be: religion, philosophy, and self-help; and conversely, the worst genres are: paranormal/comics/drama/memoir/graphic novels/young adult/manga—especially manga.)
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“Lessons from Bar Fight Litigation” (eye witness unreliability)
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“On The Rheology of Cats”, 2014 (a 2017 Ig Nobel Prize winner; demonstrates cats can be modeled as complex fluids, solids, and gases—see also “How Many Liters is Liquid Maru?” [9.2l]).
Another winner is “Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins”, et al 2015.
Economics:
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“Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis”, et al 2010
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“Lending without creditor rights, collateral, or reputation—The ‘trusted-assistant’ loan in 19th century China”, et al 2017 (A most peculiar evolved institution.)
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The subsidization, invention, and marketing of “Bailey’s Irish Cream”
Philosophy:
Misc:
Books
Nonfiction:
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Artificial Life, Levy
Fiction:
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Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen monk Shōtetsu, Steven D. Carter
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Twig, Wildbow (better than Pact, focusing on small-group dynamics, but I found the ultimately political arc less interesting than the worldbuilding which is mostly discarded halfway through, a number of subplots whimpering out, and Wildbow succumbs to pacing problems halfway again like in Pact & Worm, with several long dull arcs which badly need to be cut down to size)
Film/TV
Live-action:
Music
Touhou:
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“Dreaming Again -T.V. Million Glittering Stars Remix” (Tim Vegas feat. SYO; Double Key {C83}) [electropop]