June 2019 News
June 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 5 new essays; links on deep learning, history, technological/
June 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, May 2019/
Writings
Media
Links
Genetics:
Everything Is Heritable:
“Breed differences of heritable behavior traits in cats”, et al2019
“Diet for One? Scientists Stalk the Dream of Personalized Nutrition” (in depth longitudinal phenotyping of twins to understand diet response)
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
“Breeding crops to feed 10 billion”, et al2019 (review of ‘speed breeding’ plant breeding state-of-the-art)
“Principles of and strategies for germline gene therapy”, et al2019
“Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies” (et al2019)
“Transgenic Metarhizium rapidly kills mosquitoes in a malaria-endemic region of Burkina Faso”, et al2019 (media; on the “Mosquito Dome”)
AI:
“XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding”, et al2019 (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”, et al2019
“Search on the Replay Buffer: Bridging Planning and Reinforcement Learning”, et al2019
“Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games”, et al2019 (deep CFR for near-human level Avalon team play)
“Cats, Rats, AI, 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-Research: A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 [13%] medical reversals”, Herrera-et al2019
“Evidence on good forecasting practices from the Good Judgment Project”
“An Empirical Approach to Economic Intelligence in World War II”, 1947
Politics/
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success (on cultural natural selection: excerpts; comments)
“Predicting History”, et al2019
“The Empty Chamber” (on US Senate dysfunctionality)
“Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment”, 1998
“The Falling Man”, 2003
Ceaușescu’s Final Speech (preference falsification & signaling cascades)
Psychology/
everything is correlated: “Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data”, et al2019 (specific items/
personality trait correlations ); “Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big Five Personality Traits”, et al2019“Stereotype Threat Effects in Settings With Features Likely Versus Unlikely in Operational Test Settings: A Meta-Analysis”, et al2019 (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”, et al2019 (nulls; still no notable effects of LSD microdosing)
“The Human Antivenom Project: Since 200025ya, 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, 1965 on Bill Haast
“Snake Venom Use as a Substitute for Opioids: A Case Report and Review of Literature”, et al2018
Technology:
“The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”, et al2020 (industrial labs may have higher R&D productivity than government-funded research, at least end-to-end)
“Convergence”, 2010 (multiple discovery)
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 & An 2014
“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”, 1983
Best Of Scott Alexander’s
Raikoth.net
:
Books
Nonfiction:
On Machine Intelligence (Second Edition), 1986 (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, 1989 (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: