Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across 8 Psychiatric Disorders”⁠, PGC 2019 (everything is correlated⁠)

  • “Investigating the Genetic Architecture of Non-Cognitive Skills Using GWAS-by-Subtraction”⁠, Demangeet al2020

• Recent Evolution:

  • “The Exposome in Human Evolution: From Dust to Diesel”⁠, Trumble & Finch2019 (media⁠; previously, Hubbardet al2016⁠)

• Engineering:

  • “Utility and First Clinical Application of Screening Embryos for Polygenic Disease Risk Reduction”⁠, Treffet al2019 (Genomic Prediction)

  • “CC, world’s first cloned cat, turns 18 years old”, Katz

AI:

• “2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison”⁠, Larks

• Matters Of Scale:

  • “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models”⁠, Kaplanet al2020 (NN LMs appear to be nowhere near saturation nor training infeasibility as larger models show predictable gains and are both more compute-efficient & data-efficient (!)—onwards to GPT-3⁠?)

  • “Big Transfer (BiT): Large Scale Learning of General Visual Representations for Transfer”⁠, Kolesnikovet al2019 (blog⁠; JFT-300M⁠ showing larger=better: large benchmark gains, transfer everywhere, much more robust representations, more plausible errors, etc)

  • “DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames”⁠, Wijmanset al2019 (blog⁠; “Mishkinet al2019⁠ benchmarked classical (mapping + planning) and learning-based methods…and showed that classical methods outperform learning-based. However, they trained for ‘only’ 5 million steps…Savvaet al2019⁠ then scaled this training to 75 million steps and found that this trend reverses…Fig. 1 shows an agent does not saturate before 1 billion steps, suggesting that previous studies were incomplete by 1–2 orders of magnitude.”)

  • “Meena: Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot”⁠, Adiwardanaet al2020 (blog⁠; 2.6b parameters trained on 341GB text, although Kaplanet al2020 suggests they’d’ve done better to go much bigger & trained much less than 164 epoches; likelihood loss near identical with human-rated performance? Likelihood loss seems ultimately a flawed metric, but maybe we’re still far from hitting its limits…)

• “A Very Unlikely Chess Game”⁠ (GPT-2-1.5b shenanigans; rival implementation⁠)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “Compliance with legal requirement to report clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov: a cohort study”⁠, DeVitoet al2020; “FDA and NIH let clinical trial sponsors keep results secret and break the law”⁠, Science

• “A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement”⁠, Yeageret al2019 (the incredible shrinking ‘growth mindset’ effect & the Stainless Steel Law⁠)

• “Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists”⁠, Rubin2019 (criticizing the critics of Carroll & Doherty2019 /Zeraatkaret al2019a /Hanet al2019 /Vernooijet al2019 /Zeraatkaret al2019b⁠ /Valliet al2019 /Johnstonet al2019—“what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”)

• “Follow-up: I found two identical packs of Skittles, among 468 packs with a total of 27,740 Skittles” (empirically verifying the birthday paradox⁠ in Skittles⁠ bags)

Politics/religion:

• “The rape of men: the darkest secret of war”⁠ (case study: Libya⁠)

• “Under the Weather: As Psychiatrists And Philosophers Begin To Define A Pervasive Mental Health Crisis Triggered By Climate Change, They Ask Who Is Really Sick: The Individual Or Society?”⁠

• “Statistical Reliability Analysis For A Most Dangerous Occupation: Roman Emperor”⁠, Saleh2019

• “Parachuting For Charity: Is It Worth The Money? A 5-Year Audit Of Parachute Injuries In Tayside And The Cost To The NHS”⁠, Leeet al1999

• “What’s in a Font?: Ideological Perceptions of Typography”⁠, Haenschen & Tamul2019 (‘⁠Sunrise⁠ is the future liberals want’)

Psychology/biology:

• “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures”⁠, Forscheret al2019

• “Attention And Awareness In Stage Magic: Turning Tricks Into Research”⁠, Mackniket al2008

• “A World Without Pain: Does hurting make us human?”⁠ (cf. my essay on pain⁠)

• “What Intellectual Progress Did I Make In The 2010s?”⁠, ⁠Scott Alexander⁠ (a look back on how his ideas/beliefs evolved over the past decade of psychiatry blogging)

• “Three cases of giant panda attack on humans at Beijing Zoo”⁠, Zhanget al2014 (graphic images)

Technology:

• “Cats, Once YouTube Stars, Are Now an ‘Emerging Audience’: They’re addicted to channels like Little Kitty & Family, Handsome Nature, and Videos for Your Cat—provided their owners switch on the iPad first”⁠ (After reading this, I gave videos-for-cats another try with my cat, since he gets stir-crazy in winter. I full-screened it, in landscape mode; he continued resolutely ignoring the screen as always, until I left my earphones out and he heard the birds chirping—he went nuts, convinced a bird had gotten into the apartment, until he finally noticed the screen, and I could see the instant the lightbulb went on and he was hooked. He’ll watch videos like ⁠Paul Dinning’s “8 Hour Bird Bonanza”⁠ for as many hours as I’ll leave it on, hunting behind the monitor for the birds, and makes a nuisance of himself sitting in front of it, waiting for the birds to come back—which he is doing as I try to write this! These are truly superstimuli: cats would never see these many birds this close up so unsuspecting in the wild.)

Economics:

• “Clustering of health, crime and social-welfare inequality in 4 million citizens from two nations”⁠, Richmond-Rakerdet al2020 (everything is correlated: ⁠“Figure 4: Aggregation of poor health, crime and social-welfare dependency”⁠; previously, Belskyet al2016⁠ & Caspiet al2016⁠)

• “The Exquisitely English (and Amazingly Lucrative) World of London Clerks”

Philosophy:

• Subscripting Typographic Convention For Citations/Dates/Sources/Evidentials: A Proposal⁠

Fiction:

• “Behind the Sensationalism: Images of a Decaying Corpse in Japanese Buddhist Art”⁠, Kanda2005 (on kusozu, cf. Maraṇasati⁠; graphic images; famous examples: Body of a Courtesan in 9 stages, Kobayashi Eitaku⁠ c. 1870s, and The Death Of A Noble Lady And The Decay Of Her Body, c. 1700s)

• “Having Had No Predecessor to Imitate, He Had No Successor Capable of Imitating Him”, Alvaro de Menard (summary of the Homeric Question⁠, resolved by Parry1933⁠; also worth reading: Borges⁠ on the literary merits of different translations of Homer⁠ & The Thousand and One Nights⁠)

• “Choose Your Own Adventure: One Book, Many Readings”, Christian Swinehart 2009_16ya (visualizing paths through the classic CYOA⁠ gamebooks⁠; see also: “These Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of Choose Your Own Adventure Books: If you decide to see more, click on this story”⁠, Atlas Obscura 2017)

• “Master of Orion”⁠, Jimmy Maher (review of the seminal 4X strategy game⁠)

Misc:

• “Dorodango, the Japanese art of making mud balls: Dorodango author Bruce Gardner shares the story of how he discovered the Japanese art of hikaru dorodango” (WP⁠; Gibson⁠)

• “It Had to Be Her: Review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of⁠ Alma Mahler⁠”

Books

Nonfiction:

• An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry, Miner1968 (⁠review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• They Live⁠ (1988_37ya; ⁠review)

• Wozzeck⁠ (⁠review)