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”⁠ (what happens to the large real estate holdings & other assets of a tax-exempt religion which is disappearing?)

• “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^–₃₅2000_25ya⁠, 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_62ya 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_86ya; ⁠review⁠)

• Shin Godzilla⁠ (2016; ⁠review⁠)