Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “The Chinese National Twin Registry: a ‘gold mine’ for scientific research”, Gao et al 2019 (includes 88 MZA)
  • Emergenesis: “Genetics of Intellectual and Personality Traits Associated with Creative Genius: Could Geniuses Be Cosmobian Dragon Kings?”, Johnson & Bouchard2014 (cf. Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity; Lykken et al 1992, “Emergenesis: Genetic Traits That May Not Run in Families”; Lykken2006, “The mechanism of emergenesis”; Lykken1982, “Research With Twins: The Concept of Emergenesis”)
  • “Inequality in genetic cancer risk suggests bad genes rather than bad luck”, Stensrud & Valberg2017 (previously)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Genetic contributions to variation in human stature in prehistoric Europe”, Cox et al 2019 (phenotyping the graveyard)
  • “How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited—With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren”, Woodley et al 2019

• Engineering:

  • “Thinking About the Evolution of Complex Traits in the Era of Genome-Wide Association Studies”, Sella & Barton2019 (review on additive complex traits: architecture, evolution, & selection)
  • “The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies: New ‘living drugs’—made from a patient’s own cells—can cure once incurable cancers. But can we afford them?” (on the history of CAR-T therapy)

AI:

• ‘Pluribus’: “Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker”, Brown & Sandholm2019 (Monte Carlo CFR “stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker”; commentary)
• “How we built the Waifu Vending Machine” (HN⁠; Sizigi Studios has launched a new online interactive GAN waifu generator⁠, based in part on Danbooru2018⁠; see also my StyleGAN⁠/​TWDNE writeups)

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “The Big Crunch”, David Goodstein1994; “1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled”⁠, Scott Alexander (on the end to post-WWII Vannevar Bushian exponential growth of academia & consequences thereof: growth can’t go on forever, and it didn’t. What we see now, a quarter of a century later, is the grim equilibrium.)
• “Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams”⁠, Stefan Torges
• “Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un)history”, Weschler1994 (on the LA Museum of Jurassic Technology)
• “Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact”, Sinatra et al 2016 (no life-cycle effects on most-cited papers)
• “Super-centenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans”, Newman2019 (“a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records”)

Politics/​religion:

• T. Greer’s [“The Scholar’s Stage”](https:/​/​scholars-stage.org/ “A forum to discuss the intersections of history, behavioral science, and strategic thought, with an emphasis on East and Southeast Asian affairs.”) (Greer’s selection):

  • “Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution”

  • “Vengeance As Justice: Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Eye for an Eye”

  • “Tradition is Smarter Than You Are”

  • “When Modern War Met an Antique Art”

  • “Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, part 1”⁠, part 2⁠; “ISIS, the Mongols, and ‘The Return of Ancient Challenges’”

  • “The Cross Section Illusion”

  • Ancient Greece:

    • The Thucydides Roundtable:

      • “Everybody Wants a Thucydides Trap”
      • “Men of Honor, Men of Interest”
      • “History is Written by the Losers”

    • “Pre-Modern Battlefields Were Absolutely Terrifying”

  • China:

    • “The Radical Sun Tzu”
    • “What Edward Luttwak Doesn’t Know About Ancient China (Or a Short History of Han-Xiongnu Relations), part 1”⁠, part 2
    • “Smallpox on the Steppe”
    • “Meditations on Maoism—Ye Fu’s Hard Road Home”
    • “Reflections on China’s Stalinist Heritage I: A Tyrant’s Toolkit”⁠, “II: Just How Totalitarian is Modern China?”⁠; “Everything is Worse in China”
    • “The Utterly Dysfunctional Belt and Road”
    • “The Inner Life of Chinese Teenagers”

  • America:

    • “Ominous Parallels: What Antebellum America Can Teach Us About Our Modern Political Regime”⁠; “Shakespeare in American Politics”
    • “Awareness vs. Action: Two Modes of Protest in American History”
    • “Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”
    • “Questing for Transcendence” (cf. MLP⁠, Broyles1984)
    • “America Will Always Fail At Regional Expertise”⁠; “American Policy Makers Do Not Read Books”⁠; “You Do Not Have the People”⁠; “What Cyber-War Will Look Like”

Psychology/​biology:

• “Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?” (“‘What’s happened, I’d argue’, says Christof Koch, the president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, ‘is that a lot of things about the brain that we once thought were irreversible have turned out not necessarily to be so.’”; cf. cryonics)
• “Widespread associations between grey matter structure and the human phenome”, Couvy-Duchesne et al 2019 (nice use of ‘morphometricity’ / ​variance components to quantify total gray matter contribution to traits: Figure 1)
• “On Bloom’s two sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction”
• “The influence of familial factors on the association between IQ and educational and occupational achievement: A sibling approach”, Hegelund et al 2019 (supplement)
• “Cognitive Consequences Of Iodine Deficiency In Adolescence: Evidence From Salt Iodization In Denmark”, Serena2019 (when the Danish government legalized iodized salt: d = 0.06 on GPA)

Technology:

• “Mother Earth Mother Board”⁠, Neal Stephenson 1996 (“A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning ‘hacker tourist’ account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth”)
• “High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace” (extreme naval salvage—a surprising amount of computer modeling of the ships to determine how to safely refloat)

Economics:

• “Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics”, van de Rijt et al 2014 (only small ‘Matthew effects’ in popularity dynamics on Kickstarter/​WP/​Change.org/​Epinions: randomness, not manipulability)

Philosophy:

• “Inverse Law of Scientific Nomenclature”⁠, Scott Alexander (on the Nuwaubian Nation cult’s language delusion⁠; see also sovereign citizen movement)

Misc:

• “The King of the Ferret Leggers: What kind of person sticks a ferret down his pants for more than five consecutive hours? Our writer tried to find out”

Books

Nonfiction:

• Robert Bakewell and the Longhorn Breed of Cattle, Stanley1995 (review)

Film/​TV

Live-action:

• Free Solo (2018; review)
• Battle Angel Alita (2019; review)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978; review)
• Tron: Legacy (2010; a worthy followup to the original Tron: a colorful Daft Punk musical video meets Star Wars.)
• The Haunting (1963; review)
• Skyfall (2012)

Animated:

• Gosick (2011; review)
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988; review)
• Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012; review)

Music

Misc:

• “Derezzed” (Daft Punk & Avicii; Tron: Legacy Reconfigured {2011}) [electronic]

MLP:

• “The Place Where We Belong (Faulty Remix)” (Faulty {2019}) [electronic]