Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genes, Education, And Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study”, Papageorge & Thom2018; “Polygenic Score Analysis Of Educational Achievement And Intergenerational Mobility”, Rustichini et al 2018; “Genetic Consequences of Social Stratification in Great Britain”, Abdellaoui et al 2018 (genetically-selective emigration & geographic patterns on education & other traits)
  • “The Genetics of University Success”, Smith-Woolley et al 2018 (IQ/​EDU PGS predicts entrance exams, university admission & prestige, and grades)
  • “Fine-mapping type 2 diabetes loci to single-variant resolution using high-density imputation and islet-specific epigenome maps”, Mahajan et al 2018 (“DIAGRAM: The Gift That Keeps on Giving”)
  • UKBB+NHS aim to sequence 5 million whole-genomes in next 5 years
  • “Nobel Prize Lecture: The First Successful Organ Transplants in Man”⁠, Murray 1990 (Twin studies are the gift that keep on giving—did you know identical-twin experiments were critical in the development of transplants?)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “The genetic relationship between female reproductive traits and six psychiatric disorders”, Ni et al 2018
  • “An evolutionary compass for elucidating selection mechanisms shaping complex traits”, Uricchio et al 2018 (long-term selection for education/​height, against BMI⁠/​schizophrenia/​Crohn’s disease)
  • “Building genealogies for tens of thousands of individuals genome-wide identifies evidence of directional selection driving many complex human traits”⁠, Myers & Spiedel ASHG18 talk (recent selection on EDU/​IQ, BMI, height etc)

• Engineering:

  • Genomic Prediction launches its embryo selection service: “EPⓖT”

    Among the genetic disorders whose phenotype risk can routinely be diagnosed by EPⓖT are:

    • 300+ common single-gene disorders, such as Cystic Fibrosis, Thalassemia, BRCA, Sickle Cell Anemia, and Gaucher Disease

    • Polygenic Disease Risk, such as risk for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, Dwarfism, Hypothyroidism, Mental Disability, Atrial Fibrillation and other Cardiovascular Diseases like CAD, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and Breast Cancer.

    $1000/​case, $400/​embryo

  • “Same-Sex Mice Parents Give Birth to Healthy Brood: Gene editing and stem cell research have allowed for alternative rodent reproduction” (further IES progress)

  • “De novo domestication of wild tomato using genome editing”, Zsögön et al 2018

  • “CRISPR Gene editing restores dystrophin expression in a canine model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy”, Amoasii et al 2018 (Another promising result for fixing Duchenne with CRISPR)

AI:

• ALE progress:

  • “R2D2: Recurrent Experience Replay in Distributed Reinforcement Learning”, Kapturowski et al 2018 (new ALE/​DM Lab-30 SOTA: “exceeds human-level in 52/​57 ALE” games; large improvement over Ape-X using a RNN⁠. Just 4 years after DQN⁠, ALE borders on being solved, like ImageNet⁠, with relatively minor tweaks to NNs. Montezuma’s Revenge remains as an exploration problem but is starting to crack under various deep exploration & intrinsic reward approaches, without requiring elaborate memory, hierarchical RL, or transfer learning from humans.)
  • “Multi-task Deep Reinforcement Learning with PopArt”, Hessel et al 2018 (blog⁠; median human performance on 57 ALE tasks w/​1 NN using reward normalization+Impala)
  • “Exploration by random distillation”, Burda et al 2018 (blog⁠; deep exploration/​novelty bonus by predicting outputs of a random network: new SOTA on Montezuma’s Revenge)

• “BigGAN: Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis”, Brock et al 2018 (source⁠; a new GAN paper for a single 512px GAN scaling to all ImageNet categories & Google’s internal 290m+ image dataset. The samples are hilarious because some of them are astoundingly good—like dogs—but many are bizarre or well into the ‘uncanny valley’: crowdsourced amusing samples⁠, released models & notebook⁠, Ganbreeder for latent-space exploration; Dune-like samples)

• WBE and DRL: a Middle Way of imitation learning from the human brain (a paradigm to keep an eye on)

• “Alphabet’s Waymo begins charging passengers for self-driving cars”

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics”, Camerer et al 2016 (“About 40% of economics experiments fail replication survey”)
• “Communicating uncertainty in official economic statistics”, Manski2015 (error from systematic bias > error from random sampling error in major economic statistics)
• “Disentangling Bias and Variance in Election Polls”, Shirani-Mehr et al 2018 (systematic bias is as large as random sampling error in US election forecasting)
• “Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results”, Silberzahn et al 2018
• “First analysis of ‘pre-registered’ studies shows sharp rise in null findings”
• “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs”, De Millo et al 1979; “Fidelity in Mathematical Discourse: Is One and One Really Two?”, Davis1972; “Some Proposals for Reviving the Philosophy of Mathematics”, Hersh1979 (more background on error in mathematics)

Politics/​religion:

• “Book Review: History Of The Fabian Society” (small group tactics: how to change the world without really trying)
• “Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror”⁠, Dan Wang
• “Sort By Controversial”: a Halloween Tale
• “Great Expectations: The Case of Horatio Nelson and the Role of Confidence in Military Genius”

Psychology/​biology:

• “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory”, Mercier & Sperber2011
• “An Evaluation (and Vindication?) of Lewis Terman: What the Father of Gifted Education Can Teach the 21st Century”, Warne2018
• “A Systematic Study of Microdosing Psychedelics”, Polito & Stevenson2018
• “How to play 20 questions with nature and lose: Reflections on 100 years of brain-training research”, Katz et al 2018
• The state of ovulation evopsych research: mostly wrong, some right
• “Psychedelic psilocybin therapy for depression (MDD) granted ‘Breakthrough Therapy’ status by FDA”
• ‘Idiosyncrasy credits’, ‘weirdness points’, novelty U-curves, and writing style
• “The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour”, Lendrem et al 2018

Technology:

• “The New Science of Seeing Around Corners: Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what’s being said and faint images of what’s around a corner”

• Google+ is shutting down

• Two examples of underestimating the Roman technology/​economy:

  • The Nemi ships were over 70 meters long, their full scale only discovered in 1928, and used advanced technology like ball-bearings, bilge pumps, indoor plumbing, lead anchor stocks, and hulls indicative of standardized (industrial?) design & production
  • “The second century CE Roman watermills of Barbegal: Unraveling the enigma of one of the oldest industrial complexes”, Sürmelihindi et al 2018 (amazing what can be inferred from some peeled off lumps of minerals—Roman factories)
  • “Economic Growth in Ancient Rome”

• “The Invisible Library: Can digital technology make the Herculaneum scrolls legible after two thousand years?” (how much do we underestimate the Romans’ achievements because so much was lost or destroyed, and what survives is hilariously biased towards some topics like Platonism or an obscure mediocre Epicurean poet, while we assume that the best surviving instances = the best of all Roman instances?)

• “The Long Shot: A new kind of prediction market is testing the limits of a censorship-free, self-governing, utterly disintermediated world. This is the inside story of Augur”

Economics:

• “The Relevance of Skills to Innovation during the British Industrial Revolution, 1651–1851”, Howes2016
• “How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)”
• “The Japanese Hometown Tax”: accidental perverse incentives
• “Collecting and the age of memeing” (the Chinese market for memes)
• “So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore / ​Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale”

Philosophy:

• Rob Wiblin interviews Tyler on Stubborn Attachments and the moral imperative of economic growth

• “The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care: Many facilities are using nostalgic environments as a means of soothing the misery, panic, and rage their residents experience”:

  Some years ago, a company in Boston began marketing Simulated Presence Therapy, which involved making a prerecorded audiotape to simulate one side of a phone conversation. A relative or someone close to the patient would put together an “asset inventory” of the patient’s cherished memories, anecdotes, and subjects of special interest; a chatty script was developed from the inventory, and a tape was recorded according to the script, with pauses every now and then to allow time for replies. When the tape was ready, the patient was given headphones to listen to it and told that they were talking to the person over the phone. Because patients’ memories were short, they could listen to the same tape over and over, even daily, and find it newly comforting each time. There was a séance-like quality to these sessions: they were designed to simulate the presence of someone who was merely not there, but they could, in principle, continue even after that person was dead.

• On “doing enough” (Yoshinori Kitase: “Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, ‘If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.’”)

• “Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0”, James Richardson2010

Fiction:

• The haphazard invention of the “clue” in detective fiction: “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”, Moretti2000/​“Trees”, Moretti2005 (ch3 of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History)/​“Adventures of a Man of Science”, Batuman2005
• “Losing Your Grip: Futility and Dramatic Necessity in Shadow of the Colossus”, Fortugno2009 (from Well-Played 1.0)
• “The Last Samurai” (honor in Bushido Blade and playing well vs well played)

Books

Nonfiction:

• Like Engendr’ing Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England, Russell1986 (review)
• Donald Michie: On Machine Intelligence, Biology and More, ed Srinivasan2009 (review)

Film/​TV

Live-action:

• Shadow of the Vampire (2000) (a meta-fictional retelling of Nosferatu; Defoe kills it as the vampire, and the movie as a whole is a love-letter to silent-films & film-making)

Animated:

• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic⁠, seasons 1–8 (see my extended review)
• Incredibles 2 (review)

Music

• MLP music