Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Breed differences of heritable behaviour traits in cats”, Salonen et al 2019
  • “Diet for One? Scientists Stalk the Dream of Personalized Nutrition” (in depth longitudinal phenotyping of twins to understand diet response)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Evolutionary Perspectives on Genetic and Environmental Risk Factors for Psychiatric Disorders”, Keller2018
  • “The reach of gene-culture coevolution in animals”, Whitehead et al 2019

• Engineering:

  • “Breeding crops to feed 10 billion”, Hickey et al 2019 (review of ‘speed breeding’ plant breeding state of the art)
  • “Principles of and strategies for germline gene therapy”, Wolf et al 2019
  • “Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies” (Kodyleva et al 2019)
  • “Transgenic Metarhizium rapidly kills mosquitoes in a malaria-endemic region of Burkina Faso”, Lovett et al 2019 (media⁠; on the “Mosquito Dome”)

AI:

• “XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding”, Yang et al 2019 (NLP pretraining method that improves on BERT on 20 tasks: SQuAD/​GLUE⁠/​RACE)
• “ICML 2019 Notes”⁠, David Abel
• On “Meta Reinforcement Learning”⁠, Lilian Weng
• “Fast Task Inference with Variational Intrinsic Successor Features”, Hansen et al 2019
• “Search on the Replay Buffer: Bridging Planning and Reinforcement Learning”, Eysenbach et al 2019
• “Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games”, Serrino et al 2019 (deep CFR for near-human level Avalon team play)
• “Cats, Rats, A.I., Oh My!”⁠, Ben Hamm (cat+rat NN detector powering an Arduino for locking out cats bearing gifts)
• “Waifu Synthesis: real time generative anime”⁠, Kyle McLean (video: StyleGAN faces + GPT-2 lyrics + Project Magenta music + VST voice synthesis)
• “Does AI have a dirty mind, too?” (technically SFW)

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “Meta-Research: A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 [13%] medical reversals”, Herrera-Perez et al 2019
• “Evidence on good forecasting practices from the Good Judgment Project”
• “Seeing The Forest From The Trees: When Predicting the Behavior or Status of Groups, Correlate Means”, Lubinski & Humphreys1996
• “An Empirical Approach to Economic Intelligence in World War II”, Ruggles & Brodie1947

Politics/​religion:

• Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success (on cultural natural selection: excerpts⁠; comments)
• “Predicting History”, Risi et al 2019
• “The Empty Chamber” (on US Senate dysfunctionality)
• “Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment”, Ciotti1998
• “The Falling Man”, Junod2003
• Ceaușescu’s Final Speech (preference falsification & signaling cascades)

Psychology/​biology:

• everything is correlated: “Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data”, Gladstone et al 2019 (specific items / ​personality trait correlations); “Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big Five Personality Traits”, Stachl et al 2019
• “Stereotype Threat Effects in Settings With Features Likely Versus Unlikely in Operational Test Settings: A Meta-Analysis”, Shewach et al 2019 (still heavy publication bias; still doesn’t exist in the real world)
• “Acute subjective and behavioral effects of microdoses of LSD in healthy human volunteers”, Bershad et al 2019 (nulls; still no notable effects of LSD microdosing)
• “The Human Antivenom Project: Since 2000, Tim Friede has endured 200 snakebites & 700 injections of lethal snake venom—a masochistic quest to immunize his body & offer his blood to scientists seeking universal antivenom”⁠; cf. Cobras in His Garden, Kursh1965 on Bill Haast
• “Snake Venom Use as a Substitute for Opioids: A Case Report and Review of Literature”, Mehra et al 2018
• “Ghosts of the Tsunami”
• “A Natural Mother: The Story Of An Intellectually Disabled Woman Who Had Long Wanted A Child But Decided To Adopt A Doll Instead”
• “An Exceptional Talent for Calculative Thinking”, Hunter1962

Technology:

• “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”, Arora et al 2020 (industrial labs may have higher R&D productivity than government-funded research, at least end-to-end)
• “Convergence”, Kelly2010 (multiple discovery)
• “Chain Letter Evolution”
• “Final Fantasy 7: An oral history”
• “Safecracking for the computer scientist”, Blaze2004
• Wade Davis: “From Haitian Zombie Poison to Inuit Knives Made of Feces”⁠; “The Key to Arctic Survival: Improvised Implements of Excrement”

Economics:

• “Labour repression—the Indo-Japanese divergence”⁠, Pseudoerasmus (Indian inefficiency in textile production & long run poverty vs Japan)
• “Obesity and economic environments”, Sturm & An2014
• “The Fingerprints in the Paint: The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art” (profile of a forger/​con artist)

Fiction:

• “A Solar Labyrinth”, Wolfe1983

• Best Of Scott Alexander’s Raikoth.net:

  • “The Last Temptation of Christ”
  • “Atreus, Atreus, and Pelides: Attorneys At Law”
  • “The Story of Emily and Control”
  • “A Modest Proposal”
  • “Blessed Are The Taxonomers, For Theirs Is The Phylum Of God”
  • Fermi paradox short story
  • “The Ballad of John Darcy”

Books

Nonfiction:

• On Machine Intelligence (Second Edition), Michie1986 (considerably less interesting than Donald Michie: On Machine Intelligence, Biology and More, and almost entirely obsolete; I continue to be mystified at how little interest Michie took in connectionism.)

Fiction:

• Waiting for the Wind: Thirty-Six Poets of Japan’s Late Medieval Age, Carter1989 (a wide selection of lesser-known waka poets in Carter’s usual highly-readable translation, exploring the descendants of Fujiwara no Teika in their centuries-long battle)

Film/​TV

Live-action:

• Hero (2002; review)