June 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 5 new essays; links on deep learning, history, technological/cultural evolution, & Scott Alexander; and 2 books & 1 movie review
June 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, May 2019/2018 summary newsletter (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:
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Everything Is Heritable:
- “Breed differences of heritable behaviour traits in cats”, et al 2019
- “Diet for One? Scientists Stalk the Dream of Personalized Nutrition” (in depth longitudinal phenotyping of twins to understand diet response)
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Recent Evolution:
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Engineering:
- “Breeding crops to feed 10 billion”, et al 2019 (review of ‘speed breeding’ plant breeding state of the art)
- “Principles of and strategies for germline gene therapy”, et al 2019
- “Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies” (et al 2019 )
- “Transgenic Metarhizium rapidly kills mosquitoes in a malaria-endemic region of Burkina Faso”, et al 2019 ( media; on the “Mosquito Dome”)
AI:
- “XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding”, 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”, et al 2019
- “Search on the Replay Buffer: Bridging Planning and Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2019
- “Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games”, 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-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”, 1996
- “An Empirical Approach to Economic Intelligence in World War II”, 1947
Politics/religion:
- Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success (on cultural natural selection: excerpts; comments)
- “Predicting History”, et al 2019
- “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/biology:
- everything is correlated: “Can Psychological Traits Be Inferred From Spending? Evidence From Transaction Data”, et al 2019 ( specific items / personality trait correlations); “Behavioral Patterns in Smartphone Usage Predict Big Five Personality Traits”, et al 2019
- “Stereotype Threat Effects in Settings With Features Likely Versus Unlikely in Operational Test Settings: A Meta-Analysis”, 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”, 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, 1965 on Bill Haast
- “Snake Venom Use as a Substitute for Opioids: A Case Report and Review of Literature”, 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”, 1962
Technology:
- “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”, et al 2020 (industrial labs may have higher R&D productivity than government-funded research, at least end-to-end)
- “Convergence”, 2010 (multiple discovery)
- “Chain Letter Evolution”
- “Final Fantasy 7: An oral history”
- “Safecracking for the computer scientist”, 2004
- 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”, 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:
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“A Solar Labyrinth”, 1983
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: