September 2019 News
September 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 behavioral genetics analyses and links on AI text generation, Registered Reports, political polarization, and history of technology; 4 movie reviews.
This is the September 2019 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, August 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
On Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change in Scandinavia
Gwern.net: added Bitcoin support to
Inflation.hs; CSS optimizations to cut mobile load time by half; width-full image support
Media
Links
Genetics:
Everything Is Heritable:
“Genetic ‘General Intelligence’, Objectively Determined and Measured”, de la et al 2019 (the UKBB cognitive measures properly analyzed using genetic correlations, allowing better prediction of the genetic g ‘generalist genes’ and also test-specific cognitive performances)
“Social and non-social autism symptoms and trait domains are genetically dissociable”, et al 2019 (more evidence that embryo selection for intelligence would not also lead to greater social dysfunctionality/
autism) “Extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population”, et al 2019 (>10% ROH → −0.3–0.7SD on 7 traits like height/
intelligence) “A Prospective Analysis of Genetic Variants Associated with Human Lifespan”, et al 2019
Engineering:
“Controlled modeling of human epiblast and amnion development using stem cells”, et al 2019 (creation of quasi-embryos from stem cells; towards IES; media: TR, Nature)
“The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry” (for estimates of limits to selection/
how valuable the perfect cow would be, see Cole & Van2011) “Genetics-based methods for agricultural insect pest management”, 2019
AI:
“Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences”, et al 2019 (blog; source; training better text generation using human ratings of quality)
Matters Of Scale:
“Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using GPU Model Parallelism”, et al 2019 (text samples; earlier blog)
“Exascale Deep Learning for Scientific Inverse Problems”, et al 2019
“Large-scale Pretraining for Neural Machine Translation with Tens of Billions of Sentence Pairs”, et al 2019
“Learning to Seek: Autonomous Source Seeking with Deep Reinforcement Learning Onboard a Nano Drone Microcontroller”, et al 2019 (reminds me of Bonsai)
Statistics/
“Registered reports: an early example and analysis”, et al 2019 (parapsychology was the first field to use Registered Reports in 197649ya, which cut statistical-significance rates by 2⁄3rds: 1975a, 1975b, 19761)
“The Power of Two Random Choices: A Survey of Techniques and Results”, et al 2001
“Sparkline theory and practice”, Edward Tufte (examples & questions)
Politics/
“Anthropology’s Science Wars: Insights from a New Survey”, et al 2019 (visualizations)
“Leninthink: On the practice behind the theory of Marxism-Leninism”
Psychology/
“Effect of Lower Versus Higher Red Meat Intake on Cardiometabolic and Cancer Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Randomized Trials”, et al 2019 (“diets lower in red meat may have little or no effect on all-cause mortality (HR 0.99 [95% CI, 0.95–1.03])”; on the accusations of conflicts of interest)
“Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception”, et al 2019
“Is Cognitive Functioning Impaired in Methamphetamine Users? A Critical Review”, et al 2012
“Nature’s Spoils: The underground food movement ferments revolution”
Technology:
“STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems: ‘A Science Experiment’”, et al 2012 (writing a GUI OS in 20k LoC; tricks include ASCII art networking DSLs & generic optimization for text layout)
“Secrets by the thousands”, 1946 (more on the post-WWII brain drain from Germany/
Europe to the USA) “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”, 1971; “Terminal Delinquents: Once, They Stole Hubcaps And Shot Out Street-Lights. Now They’re Stealing Your Social Security Number And Shooting Out Your Credit Rating. A Layman’s Guide To Computer High Jinks”, 1990 (I feel this article must have been a reference for Hackers)
“The Radioactive Boy Scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor”, 1998
“Fancy Euclid’s Elements in TeX”, Slyusarev Sergey (with generative dropcaps); “Making of Byrne’s Euclid”, Nicholas Rougeux (how to create a beautiful interactive HTML version of Byrne’s unique color-diagram book interpretation of Euclid’s Elements (Tufte discussion); you shouldn’t do this sort of thing for everything, but maybe you should try to do it for something)
“SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback”, 2012
“Mark of Integrity”, Jonathan Allen (on juiced cards, luminous readers, sunning the deck, and other card sharpers’ tricks for card marking)
Economics:
“Managing an iconic old luxury brand in a new luxury economy: Hermès handbags in the US market”, 2014 (Summary; see also “Birkin Demand: A Sage & Stylish Investment”, 2016)
Fiction:
Bakker’s Second Apocalypse & Frank Herbert’s Dune: time loops & finding freedom in an unfree universe (compare Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”)
Misc:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Falling Down (199332ya)
Animated:
Neon Genesis Evangelion Concurrency Project (201312ya; review)
Music
“ann～庵～” (茶太 feat. Chata; 『spill over』 {C95}) [rock]
“cardiac sound” (Kirin; Cleave Spark the Instrumental {C95}) [trance]
MLP:
“Getting Stronger” (Michelle Creber, Black Gryph0n, Baasik; Getting Stronger {2016}) [rock]
“Landscapes” (Mane in Green {2016}) [electronic]
“Moonlight” (Black Gryph0n & Baasik; IMmortal {201411ya}) [trance]
“Faster Than You Know” (Black Gryph0n & Baasik; IMmortal {201411ya}) [pop]
Doujin:
“Natsukage -endless summer lights-” (Falmaki; Natsukage -endless summer lights- {C94}) [post-rock]