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:
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“Breed differences of heritable behavior traits in cats”, et al 2019
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“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:
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“Breeding crops to feed 10 billion”, et al 2019 (review of ‘speed breeding’ plant breeding state-of-the-art)
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“Principles of and strategies for germline gene therapy”, et al 2019
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“Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies” (et al 2019 )
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“Transgenic Metarhizium rapidly kills mosquitoes in a malaria-endemic region of Burkina Faso”, et al 2019 ( media; on the “Mosquito Dome”)
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AI:
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“XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding”, et al 2019 (NLP pretraining method that improves on BERT on 20 tasks: SQuAD/GLUE/RACE)
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“ICML 2019 Notes”, David Abel
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On “Meta Reinforcement Learning”, Lilian Weng
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“Fast Task Inference with Variational Intrinsic Successor Features”, et al 2019
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“Search on the Replay Buffer: Bridging Planning and Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2019
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“Finding Friend and Foe in Multi-Agent Games”, et al 2019 (deep CFR for near-human level Avalon team play)
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“Cats, Rats, A.I., Oh My!”, Ben Hamm (cat+rat NN detector powering an Arduino for locking out cats bearing gifts)
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“Waifu Synthesis: real time generative anime”, Kyle McLean (video: StyleGAN faces + GPT-2 lyrics + Project Magenta music + VST voice synthesis)
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“Does AI have a dirty mind, too?” (technically SFW)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
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“Meta-Research: A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 [13%] medical reversals”, Herrera-et al 2019
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“Evidence on good forecasting practices from the Good Judgment Project”
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“An Empirical Approach to Economic Intelligence in World War II”, 1947
Politics/religion:
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Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success (on cultural natural selection: excerpts; comments)
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“Predicting History”, et al 2019
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“The Empty Chamber” (on US Senate dysfunctionality)
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“Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment”, 1998
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“The Falling Man”, 2003
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Ceaușescu’s Final Speech (preference falsification & signaling cascades)
Psychology/biology:
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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
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“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)
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“Acute subjective and behavioral effects of microdoses of LSD in healthy human volunteers”, et al 2019 (nulls; still no notable effects of LSD microdosing)
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“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
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“Snake Venom Use as a Substitute for Opioids: A Case Report and Review of Literature”, et al 2018
Technology:
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“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)
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“Convergence”, 2010 (multiple discovery)
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Wade Davis: “From Haitian Zombie Poison to Inuit Knives Made of Feces”; “The Key to Arctic Survival: Improvised Implements of Excrement”
Economics:
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“Labour repression—the Indo-Japanese divergence”, Pseudoerasmus (Indian inefficiency in textile production & long run poverty vs Japan)
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“Obesity and economic environments”, Sturm & An 2014
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“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
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Best Of Scott Alexander’s
Raikoth.net
:
Books
Nonfiction:
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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:
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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: