Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Breed differences of heritable behavior 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, 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-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_25ya, 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 & 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”⁠, 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”⁠