Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Estimating the effect-size of gene dosage on cognitive ability across the coding genome”, Huguet et al 2020
  • “Genome-wide Association Study of Creativity Reveals Genetic Overlap With Psychiatric Disorders, Risk Tolerance, and Risky Behaviors”, Li et al 2020

• Recent Evolution:

  • “The Genomics of Human Local Adaptation”, Rees et al 2020 (review)

AI:

• Jukebox⁠, OpenAI

  (Dhariwal et al 2020⁠; full sample dataset⁠; Github) Followup to MuseNet showing remarkable synthesis of raw audio with joint music+voice-singing using a hierarchy of Sparse Transformers in a VQ-VAE trained on n = 1.2m with lyrics/​artist/​genre metadata.

  

• “Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits: By studying the connections between neurons, we can find meaningful algorithms in the weights of neural networks”, Olah et al 2020 (reverse-engineering small parts of CNN classifiers)

• “Sequence Modeling with CTC: A visual guide to Connectionist Temporal Classification, an algorithm used to train deep neural networks in speech recognition, handwriting recognition and other sequence problems”, Hannun2017

• RL:

  • “Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data”, Laskin et al 2020/​“Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels”, Kostrikov et al 2020; “CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning”, Srinivas et al 2020 (all more sample-efficient than Dreamer/​MuZero; the semi-supervised revolution comes to RL)
  • “Dream to Control (Dreamer): Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination”, Hafner et al 2020 (blog⁠; PlaNet followup; no real comparison with MuZero or Agent57 available & already outperformed by model-free methods?)
  • “Suphx: Mastering Mahjong with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Li et al 2020

• Matters Of Scale:

  • “2019 trends in GPU price per FLOPS”⁠, AI Impacts 2020
  • “Blender: Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot”, Roller et al 2020 (blog⁠; “The larger model achieves a better performance in fewer steps, consistent with other works…”)

Statistics/​Meta-Science:

• “Impact of Valid Selection Procedures on Work-Force Productivity”, Schmidt et al 1979 (how to directly convert context-less statistical prediction metrics like R² into decisions/​payoffs)
• “The Stewart Retractions: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis”, Pickett2020 (forensic statistics)
• “Fuck Nuance”, Healy2017

Politics/​religion:

• “Smart, Qualified People Behind The Scenes Keeping America Safe: ‘We Don’t Exist’”
• 2017 Congressional baseball shooting
• 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack
• “The Story Of Thanksgiving Is A Science-Fiction Story”⁠, Scott Alexander
• “Let There Be Light!”, David Feuer2001 (attempted psychiatry among the Hasidim of Brooklyn)
• “When Pixels Collide” (the Reddit  / ​r / ​place April Fools was “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”)

Psychology/​biology:

• “Why do human beings keep getting diseases from bats?”⁠, Trevor Klee (why so many bat-borne viruses? Perhaps adaptation to flight forcing a reduced adaptive immune system—pace Hedrick2004 on the dubious benefits of an adaptive immune system)
• “Showing that you care: The evolution of health altruism”, Hanson2008 (it is more important to seem good than to do good)
• “Different Worlds”⁠, Scott Alexander (“nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation”)
• Schizoid personality disorder (note that Henry Darger is more like schizotypal personality disorder than schizoid)
• “Are humans constantly but subconsciously smelling themselves?”, Perl et al 2020
• “How mammals stay healthy in nature: the evolution of behaviours to avoid parasites and pathogens”, Hart & Hart2018 (why do cats⁠/​dogs eat grass? Possibly parasite resistance: Huffman et al 1996⁠/​Huffman & Caton2001⁠; Sueda et al 2008⁠/​Hart2008⁠; Hart et al 2019)

Technology:

• “Cleaning up after WWII” (a photo anthology)
• “A New Breed of Drug Dealer Has Turned Buying Drugs into a Treasure Hunt: Most Russian drug dealers don’t hand off drugs anymore—they stash them in geotagged hiding spots ready for pickup by online buyers” (update on Hydra/​RAMP DNMs)
• “Safecracker Meets Safecracker”⁠, Richard Feynman 1985 (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!)
• “How the Man Who Invented Xbox Baked a 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Sourdough: It took three experts, two museums, and one clay pot to bake a truly ancient loaf”

Economics:

• “The Federal Income Tax: Its History and Peculiarities”, Brooks1969

Philosophy:

• “Constructing a Logic of Plausible Inference: A Guide to Cox’s Theorem”, van Horn2003 (WP)
• “Anthropic Shadow: Observation Selection Effects and Human Extinction Risks”⁠, Ćirković et al 2010

Fiction:

• “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic: National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But—somehow, for some reason—Weird Al keeps rocking”
• “Galileo’s discovery of scaling laws”, Peterson2002 (physics & Dante fanfics; commentary⁠; see also Haldane’s “On Being the Right Size”)

Misc:

• Review of Atlas of Oblique Maps: A Collection of Landform Portrayals of Selected Areas of the World (warning: 282MB PDF; collection of gorgeous hand-drawn oblique projection created for the US Geological Survey)

• “The Most Modern of Modern Sports: The secret runaway success of Kenneth Gandar-Dower’s racing cheetahs”

• “Everything on ‘Naked and Afraid’ Is Real—and I Lived It: When the Discovery Channel invited me to audition for its popular survival-challenge reality show, I knew it was going to be rough. What followed was one of the most intense experiences of my life.”⁠, Blair Braverman (Naked and Afraid)

• “The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi” (profile of Charles Ponzi)

• Best Of Matt Lakeman:

  • “Against Dog Ownership” (cf. Cat Sense)
  • “Everything You Need to Know About Napoleon Bonaparte”
  • “Little Soldiers—Inside the Chinese Education System”
  • “Peep Show—The Most Realistic Portrayal of Evil Ever Made”
  • “Hillbilly Elegy—The Culture of White American Poverty”⁠; “The New Epidemic—My Experience of Losing a Friend to Heroin”
  • “An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron” (cf. Timing on thin lines)
  • “Disaster Artist—Insanity is No Shortcut to Inspiration” (Sestero’s book on Tommy Wiseau’s The Room)
  • “The Phantom’s Pain—A Metal Gear Solid V Narrative Analysis” (how can MGS:V be ‘the tragedy of Big Boss’ when you turn out to be playing his body double?)
  • “A Deep Dive into K-pop”

Film/​TV

• Rams (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “Friday Night Phantasy” (Swing Holic Band; SWING HOLIC VOL.2 {M3-22}) [jazz]
• “Deeper and Deeper” (Swing Holic Band; SWING HOLIC VOL.2 {M3-22}) [jazz]
• “Starlight Spark” (鈴丸; STARLIGHT SPARK {C90}) [jazz]

Vocaloid:

• “When I Wake Up” (TUNO桐音 feat. Luo Tianyi & Yuezheng Ling⁠; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [pop]
• “要有光” (TUNO桐音 feat. Luo Tianyi & Yuezheng Ling; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [trance]
• “Back To You” (TUNO桐音; Travel For Lights (Last Version) {2017}) [trance]
• “True Lie” (にせもの feat. Namine Ritsu; postgazer {VM35}) [shoegaze]
• “Shoegazer” (ぴぼ feat. Nizimine Kakoi; postgazer {VM35}) [shoegaze]

MLP:

• “Second Hoof Medley” (Exiark; Echoes {2019}) [electronic]
• “Zenith” (Frozen Night feat. Velvet R. Wings; Echoes {2019}) [orchestral]
• “Who Knows” (4EverfreeBrony feat. Milkymomo, EileMonty & MEMJ0123; Echoes {2019}) [acoustic]
• “Smile Song Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
• “Love Is In Bloom Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
• “Winter Wrap Up Remix” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]
• “Art of the Dress Chiptune” (VoltPon3; Chiptune Pony {2013}) [chiptune]

Misc:

• “Somebody That I Used to Know (80s Remix)” (Gotye feat. kimbra {2017}) [pop]
• “Never Be Alone” (TheFatRat {2015}) [trance]