Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior”, Ganna et al 2019 (as expected, except for the genetic heterogeneity between homosexuality & bisexuality?)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Genomic Evidence for Local Adaptation of Hunter-Gatherers to the African Rainforest”, Lopez et al 2019

• Engineering:

  • 5 Russian couples who are deaf want to try CRISPR so they can have a hearing child by fixing GJB2 gene mutations

AI:

• “Reward Tampering Problems and Solutions in Reinforcement Learning: A Causal Influence Diagram Perspective”, Everitt & Hutter2019 (blog: “Designing agent incentives to avoid reward tampering”⁠; LW)

• “Has dynamic programming improved decision making?”, Rust2018 (some case-studies)

• Matters Of Scale:

  • LM news: MegatronLM⁠, Nvidia (training a GPT-2-8.3B (!), which overfits on their dataset); “GPT-2: 6-Month Follow-Up”⁠, OpenAI (release of GPT-2-774M); “OpenGPT-2: We Replicated GPT-2 Because You Can Too”, Gokaslan & Cohen2019 (public release of an independently-trained GPT-2-1.5b model)

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “We Need a New Science of Progress: Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better”⁠, Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen
• “Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design”, Isakov et al 2019
• “Scott and Scurvy”
• The Gambler’s Fallacy in action at the Monte Carlo Casino, 1893-08-18

Politics/​religion:

• “How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science”, Mercier2017
• “Mass Shootings: Definitions and Trends”⁠, RAND 2018 (what do statistics like “there were 371 mass shootings in 2015” actually mean?)
• “Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days; The anti-medical dogma of Christian Science led my father to an agonising death. Now the church itself is in decline—and it can’t happen fast enough”
• “Why Don’t Colleges Get Rid of Their Bad Fraternities? A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame”
• “Why Men Love War”, Broyles1984
• Review: From Third World to First: The Singapore Story—1965–2000⁠, by Lee Kuan Yew: part 1⁠/​, 2: “You are free to agree”⁠, 3: “Race, language, and uncomfortable questions”⁠, 4: “The pathway to power”
• “Peter Thiel’s Religion”⁠, David Perell (highly speculative but interesting)

Psychology/​biology:

• “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment”, Le Texier2019
• “A Silent Childhood”, Rymer1992 (on the Genie child abuse case & origin of language; Genie’s cognitive profile—strong nonverbal skills, weak verbal/​social—reminds me of chimpanzee vs children)
• “What the voice inside your head says about you: We tend to assume that our internal monologue ‘speaks’ in words—but it turns out that, for many of us, it’s much more complicated” (see also “Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking”, Hurlburt et al 2013; “The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults”, McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough2011)
• Structured Procrastination
• “The Generative Adversarial Brain”, Gershman2019 (on the origins of psychiatric disorders)
• “Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering”⁠, Qualia Computing
• “The Devil’s Bait: Symptoms, signs, and the riddle of Morgellons”⁠; “Maybe It’s Lyme: What happens when illness becomes an identity?”
• “Developmental antecedents of achieved eminence”, Simonton1987
• “The Efficacy of Modafinil as a Cognitive Enhancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, Kredlow et al 2019
• “Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days’ duration”, Stewart & Fleming1973

Technology:

• “Atchafalaya”, John McPhee1987 (on the Old River Control Structure & ultimately doomed attempt to keep the Mississippi River in place)
• “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”
• “Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law”
• “Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone”, Kwong et al 2019
• “The Road to Clarity” (on the creation of the since-controversial Clearview highway font)

Economics:

• “The Launch: Inside the ‘largest launch of a produce item in American history’” (more on apple breeding & selling: the Cosmic Crisp apple⁠; finally became available in my area in late 2020—I thought they were decent enough, pretty, but too sweet and uncompetitively priced compared to Honeycrisp/​SweeTango)
• “Bayesian Persuasion and Information Design”, Kamenica2019
• “Can You Indemnify Against Dick Pics? The rise of scandal insurance in Hollywood”

Philosophy:

• “Consider the Lobster: For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more”⁠, David Foster Wallace 2004

Fiction:

• “A science fiction writer of the Fifties”⁠, Brad Leithauser 2006
• “How a Literary Prank Convinced Germany That ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Was Real: A 1963 book purported to prove that the siblings were murderous bakers”

Misc:

• “An Inside Look at the Surprisingly Violent Quidditch World Cup”

Books

Fiction:

• Curves and Angles⁠, Brad Leithauser (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Gone with the Wind (1939; review)
• Shin Godzilla (2016; review)