August 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 short essays, a major new site features, and links on AI, progress, and technology; 1 short book review, and 2 long movie reviews on ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Shin Godzilla’.
August 2019’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, July 2019 (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
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Gwern.net:
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popups.js
: a new JS library which reads link annotations and displays them in a popup (eg. WP displays title/summary, and papers display title/author/date/abstract); works on mobile; generalizes & obsoleteswikipedia-popups.js
:popups.js
reads static annotations, removing the runtime spam, and importantly, annotations are now cached at compile-time, so additional sources can be included. It currently provides link annotations for Arxiv, bioRxiv, Pubmed Central, PLOS, Crossref, Gwern.net, and hand-written annotations, in-popup YouTube video support, with a fallback to Chrome/Ghostscript-generated screenshot previews for all other URLs - added more custom-SVG/text link icons for link icons (custom: arXiv/BioRxiv (unofficial), Google Scholar, Pubmed, Internet Archive, Guardian, NYT, New Yorker, Washington Post, DeepMind, OpenAI, MIRI, Erowid)
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Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
- “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior”, et al 2019 (as expected, except for the genetic heterogeneity between homosexuality & bisexuality?)
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Recent Evolution:
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Engineering:
AI:
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“Reward Tampering Problems and Solutions in Reinforcement Learning: A Causal Influence Diagram Perspective”, 2019 (blog: “Designing agent incentives to avoid reward tampering”; LW)
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“Has dynamic programming improved decision making?”, 2018 (some case-studies)
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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”, 2019 (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”, 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”, 2017
- “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”, 1984
- 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 2019
- “A Silent Childhood”, 1992 (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”, et al 2013; “The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults”, McCarthy-2011)
- Structured Procrastination
- “The Generative Adversarial Brain”, 2019 (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”, 1987
- “The Efficacy of Modafinil as a Cognitive Enhancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, et al 2019
- “Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days’ duration”, 1973
Technology:
- “Atchafalaya”, John 1987 (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”, 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”, 2019
- “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:
Books
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Gone with the Wind (1939; review)
- Shin Godzilla (2016; review)