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
- Sperm selection as minor enhancement to embryo selection
- On Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change in Scandinavia
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Gwern.net: added Bitcoin support to
Inflation.hs
; CSS optimizations to cut mobile load time by half; width-full image support
Media
Links
Genetics:
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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)
- “The Genetics of Human Skin and Hair Pigmentation”, 2019
- “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)
- UKBB announces WGS of all n = 500,000 participants
- “A Prospective Analysis of Genetic Variants Associated with Human Lifespan”, et al 2019
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Engineering:
- “Controlled modelling 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:
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“Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences”, et al 2019 ( blog; source; training better text generation using human ratings of quality)
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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/Meta-Science:
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“Registered reports: an early example and analysis”, et al 2019 (parapsychology was the first field to use Registered Reports in 1976, which cut statistical-significance rates by 2⁄3rds: 1975a, 1975b, 19761)
- “Methods for Studying Coincidences”, 1989
- “The Power of Two Random Choices: A Survey of Techniques and Results”, et al 2001
- “Sparkline theory and practice”, Edward Tufte (examples & questions)
Politics/religion:
- “Constitutional Hardball”, 2004
- “Anthropology’s Science Wars: Insights from a New Survey”, et al 2019 ( visualizations)
- “Leninthink: On the practice behind the theory of Marxism-Leninism”
- “Dear Young Eccentric”
Psychology/biology:
- “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 to 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
- “Dumb or smart asses? Donkey’s (Equus asinus) cognitive capabilities share the heritability and variation patterns of human’s (Homo sapiens) cognitive capabilities”, et al 2019
- “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 drop caps); “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 (1993)
Animated:
- Redline (2009; review)
- Neon Genesis Evangelion Concurrency Project (2013; 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 {2014}) [trance]
- “Faster Than You Know” (Black Gryph0n & Baasik; IMmortal {2014}) [pop]
Doujin:
- “Natsukage -endless summer lights-” (Falmaki; Natsukage -endless summer lights- {C94}) [post-rock]