June 2018 News
June 2018 Gwern.net newsletter with links on genetics, reinforcement learning, cats, experimentation, with 6 book reviews and 12 music links.
This is the June 2018 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, May 2018 (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:
Everything Is Heritable:
“Genetic Endowments and Wealth Inequality”, et al 2020 ( et al 2018 EDU/
IQ PGS predicts education, longevity, retirement wealth, stock investments, risk-taking, and rationality) “The personal and clinical utility of polygenic risk scores”, et al 2018; the value of an accurate PGS: it can predict chemotherapy to be unnecessary in 70% of breast cancer patients: “Adjuvant Chemotherapy Guided by a 21-Gene Expression Assay in Breast Cancer”, et al 2018
“GWAS for risk taking propensity indicates shared pathways with body mass index”, et al 2018
“Frequency and distribution of 152 Mendelian genetic disease variants in over 100,000 mixed breed and purebred dogs”, et al 2018 (consumer dog genetics going impressively well)
“The genetic architecture of hair color in the UK population”, et al 2018; “GWAS reveals sex-specific genetic architecture of facial attractiveness”, et al 2018
“GWAS meta-analysis highlights light-induced signaling as a driver for refractive error”, et al 2018; “Education and myopia: assessing the direction of causality by Mendelian Randomization”, et al 2018 (genetic support for the bright-light theory of myopia? The various enrichments don’t seem consistent with ‘near work’ or other theories of nearsightedness.)
“wMT-GWAS: Improving genetic prediction by leveraging genetic correlations among human diseases and traits”, et al 2018
“30 loci identified for heart rate response to exercise and recovery implicate autonomic nervous system”, et al 2018 (calories in, calories out?)
“Genetic influence on social outcomes during and after the Soviet era in Estonia”, et al 2018 (a nice counterpoint to et al 2016: de-Communization increased meritocracy and EA PGS predictive power went up, while Swedish school mandating more public schooling for everyone made EA PGS predictive power go down.)
“The contribution of common genetic risk variants for ADHD to a general factor of childhood psychopathology”, et al 2018; “Genetics of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”, 2018 review
“Personality and Genetic Associations With Military Service”, Miles & Haider-2018
“Grandma’s trauma—a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans”, Kevin Mitchell
“Do Jobs Run in Families?” (Perhaps one day Facebook will produce some pedigree analyses nailing down heritability of all measured traits.)
“Re-identification of genomic data using long range familial searches”, et al 2018 (“we leveraged genomic data of 600,000 individuals tested with consumer genomics to investigate the power of such long-range familial searches. We project that half of the searches with European-descent individuals will result with a third cousin or closer match”)
“Behaviour Genetic Frameworks of Causal Reasoning for Personality Psychology”, et al 2018 (review)
Recent Evolution:
“Canine transmissible venereal tumor genome reveals ancient introgression from coyotes to arctic sled dogs”, et al 2018 (transmissible cancer is weird)
Racial differences: “Study of short Peruvians reveals new gene with a major impact on height” (Admixture study identifies FBN1 gene reducing height by 2–4cm in Peruvians, possibly selected for.)
“Where Female Elephants Without Tusks Roam—and Poachers Stay Away: South Africa’s Addo elephant park has few females with tusks, a trait that has died off because of hunting but also keeps poachers away” (recent evolution of tusklessness as a sex-linked trait due to selection from poaching)
Engineering:
“Besting Johnny Appleseed: With a few tricks, and a lot of patience, fruit geneticists are undoing the work of an American legend”, 2010 (genomic selection; cryogenic storage; accelerated maturation; and intensified environments for accurate measurement)
AI:
OpenAI progress on 5x5 DoTA: amateur human level (commentary; Human amateur level 5x5 DoTA using nothing but simple PPO LSTMs and a lot of computing power to power self-play over 19 days. No need for anything fancy for ultra-long-range temporal learning, just LSTMs are enough memory to learn strategizing. Deep learning scales. More concerningly: they note that their code can reach human levels even with crashing bugs…)
“One-Shot Imitation from Watching Videos”: imitation learning + MAML, Yu & Finn
“Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation” ( et al 2018: 96% grasping success; generalizing DQN to continuous robot actions by biting the bullet of blackbox optimizing over Q-values to get next-action choices)
Ultra-low bit-rate audio for tiny podcasts with Codec2 and WaveNet decoders (1 hour = 1MB)
“The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic: Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself” (the disaster that derailed early NN research)
Statistics/
“The Impostor Cell Line That Set Back Breast Cancer Research”
“What does it mean to have a low R2? A warning about misleading interpretation” (Small r correlation coefficients can still be highly effective for ranking/
selection. This is a particularly common illusion in individual differences/ genetics discussions.)
Politics/
Observations on the Puerto Rico death toll (The baseline for this hurricane study is suspicious, and just 3 fewer reported deaths in the survey would’ve made the statistical-significance go away.)
“How the Startup Mentality Failed Kids in San Francisco” (“‘We tried to make it work’, Brown insisted as we sat in his office. ‘We put kids in uniform, we did everything.’ He shook his head as if astonished by the outcome.”)
Fads in politics: “Up and down with ecology—the ‘issue-attention cycle’”, 1972; “On Anthony Downs’s ‘Up and Down with Ecology: The “Issue-Attention” Cycle’”, Gupta & Jenkins-2015
“Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality”, 2002 (on female intrasexual competition)
Psychology/
“Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness”, et al 2017 (Non-replication of the classic split-brain consciousness studies)
“Pharmacological cognitive enhancement among non-ADHD individuals—A cross-sectional study in 15 countries”, et al 2018 (Modafinil use prevalence & self-reported efficacy in GDS: Figure 2)
The case of Kirk Allen—“The Jet-Propelled Couch”: “Part I: The man who traveled through space”/
“Part II: Return to Earth” (republished in The Fifty-Minute Hour, 1955; see also “Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch: Cordwainer Smith and Kirk Allen”, 2002) “Association of Efficacy of Resistance Exercise Training With Depressive Symptoms: Meta-analysis and Meta-regression Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials”, et al 2018 (supplement)
“The Devil’s in the g-tails: Deficient letter-shape knowledge and awareness despite massive visual experience”, et al 2018 (media; the poverty of perception & mental imagery)
“Nocebo effects with antidepressant clinical drug trial placebos”, et al 2007 (overdosing on placebos)
“Perceived mental health from men’s facial appearance reflects actual mental health”, et al 2018
Cats:
“Object play in adult domestic cats: the roles of habituation and disinhibition”, et al 2002 (we’re doing cat toys wrong—they need to be novel & mutable to provide the thrill of the kill)
“Pinch-induced Behavioral Inhibition (‘Clipnosis’) in Domestic Cats”, et al 2007 (useful tip)
“The genesis of the cat’s responses to the rat”, 1930; “Further study of the behavior of the cat toward the rat”, 1938 (Apparently kittens raised with mice will not attack or eat them—unless they see other cats attacking mice, in which case they turn on the mice.)
“The Wild Cat: A Highland Gentleman”, Frances 1950 (Pitt’s account of difficulties raising Scottish wild cats & offspring, with cute photos.)
Technology:
“Lessons of Amish Hackers” (chapter 10 of Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants 201015ya)
“BitWhisper: Covert Signaling Channel between Air-Gapped Computers Using Thermal Manipulations”, et al 2015 (Another slightly terrifying sidechannel escape from boxing.)
Economics:
“Who Owns Your Body Parts? Everyone’s making money in the market for body tissue—except the donors”
“1,000 True Fans”, Kevin Kelly (The rise of Patreon/
Kickstarter/ live-streaming really exemplifies this dynamic.)
Books
Nonfiction:
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Carreyrou 2018 (review)
Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–10199332ya, 2002 (review)
On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014 (review)
Research Fraud in the Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences, et al 1993 (review)
100 Years of Nobel Prizes, 2003 (review)
Fiction:
Film/TV
Animated:
Pop Team Epic (tremendous visual imagination and dedication married to some of the worst ‘humor’ inflicted on me yet; I was dubious but Poptepipic’s meme game was so stronk I figured it had to be good. But it was not. Except for the “Hellshake Yanno” skit which ranks up with the manga-mation scene in FLCL for mixed-media greatness and is well worth watching on its own.)
Music
Touhou:
“stardust catalyst” (crescentia; Touhou Orchestral Suite II—Resurrection {RDT2017}) [orchestral rock]
Doujin:
“夜祭” (B.rose&crown; Alfheim {M3-37}) [Celtic]
“Starflake Valley” (Nago; ENIGMATIC LINER {C93}) [trance]
“senpai, notice me!” (Camellia feat. Nanahira; Force! {C93}) [electronic/
Jpop] “Morning Glory” (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]
“Hydrangea” (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]
“Carnation” (Ujico*; [FLOWERS] {C92}) [house]
Vocaloid:
“Hello, Worker” (Marasy; Vocalo Piano {2017}) [classical]
“心做し” (Marasy; Vocalo Piano {2017}) [classical]
“ENERGY CORE CORD D” (GINnNo feat. Miku; Synergy-Style Vol. 7 {C91}) [dubstep]
“Alice in Freezer” (Orangestar feat. MARY; No Doubt He Uses Magic. {2017}) [Jpop]
Misc:
“The Pass” (Rush; Presto {198936ya}) [rock]