AI

• “DeepVecFont: Synthesizing High-quality Vector Fonts via Dual-modality Learning”, Wang & Lian2021

• “How Does AI Improve Human Decision-Making? Evidence from the AI-Powered Go Program”, Choi et al 2021 (absolute human error rates: from the AI’s perspective, every move a Go pro makes, costs them ~1.2% chance of winning)

• “State of AI Report2021”, Benaich & Hogarth2021

• “Achieving Human Parity on Visual Question Answering”, Yan et al 2021

• “Transformers are Meta-Reinforcement Learners”, Anonymous2021 (expected, but good to check); “Transformers Can Do Bayesian Inference”, Anonymous2021 (meta-learning amortized Bayesian inference inside a Transformer—less expected, but neat)

• “ruDALL-E”: 1.2b-parameter DALL·E 1 trained on n=120m by Sberbank, public trained model (generates everything, including anime)

• Shadow Planet, by The Cotton Modules (album by Jesse Solomon Clark & Robin Sloan, exchanging edits of Jukebox tracks; “It’s basically a tuba! A very… strange… and powerful… tuba… … like wandering in an enormous labyrinth or a dead city”)

  • sequel

• “This Catgirl Does Not Exist”, EdZ543 (StyleGAN2-Ada on Safebooru catgirls, transfer-learned from TWDNEv2)

Matters Of Scale:

• “Fictitious Co-Play: Collaborating with Humans without Human Data”, Strouse et al 2021 (blessings of scale: diverse populations of agents automatically train more flexible & human-compatible agents, without fancy tricks)

• “A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models”, Reif et al 2021 (improves on Story Centaur; turns out I almost got general text style transfer working earlier; see also this review of older text style transfer research—another Bitter Lesson; how many tens of millions of dollars in researcher/volunteer time, grants, overhead, publication/peer-review etc was, and will be, spent on dataset creation & clever research over the past decade, all to get worse results than politely asking an off-the-shelf large text model?)

• “Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models”, West et al 2021 (GPT-3 can generate commonsense causal knowledge graphs as good as a human-generated graph)

• “Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners”, He et al 2021

• “Visible Thoughts Project and Bounty Announcement”, MIRI ($200k prize for dataset teaching language models to ‘internal monologue’)

• “LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs”, Schuhmann et al 2021

• “CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes”, Dai et al 2021 (90.88% ImageNet SOTA, set by CoAtNet-2.44b pretrained on JFT-3B)

• “Turing Bletchley: A Universal Image Language Representation model by Microsoft” (2.5b-param; n ~ billions + 0.5b CC translation pairs; beats CLIP/ALIGN)

• “Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN”, Anonymous2021 (improving ViT-GAN up to 1.7b-parameters); “HARP: Autoregressive Latent Video Prediction with High-Fidelity Image Generator”, Anonymous2021

• “Effect of scale on catastrophic forgetting in neural networks”, Anonymous2021

• “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models”, Bommasani et al 2021

• “A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry”, Bubeck & Sellke2021 (Twitter, talk; blessings of scale—scaling is also magic pixie dust for adversarial attacks, bitter-lessoning an entire academic field of ever more elaborate (yet failed) defenses…?); “Why Robust Generalization in Deep Learning is Difficult: Perspective of Expressive Power”, Li et al 2022

• “On the Predictability of Pruning Across Scales”, Rosenfeld et al 2020 (scaling laws for sparsity: initially free large size reductions, then power-law worsening, then plateau at tiny but bad models)

• “Sparse Is Enough in Scaling Transformers”, Jaszczur et al 2021

• “What Are Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors Really Like?”, Izmailov et al 2021 (frequentist-trained NNs nevertheless are samples from the posterior, so ensembles—and increasingly-large models?—are fully Bayesian)

• “GHVAE: Greedy Hierarchical Variational Autoencoders for Large-Scale Video Prediction”, Wu et al 2021

• “DALL·E 1 mini: Generate images from a text prompt”, Daym et al 2021 (project/hackathon writeup of training a small-scale DALL·E 1; while not nearly as good as the full-scale OA model, of course, the results would’ve been striking just 2 years ago, and are trained on merely a TPUv3-8—demonstrating the hardware overhang and the ease of replication once you know what you’re doing.¹)

• “Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models”, Tsimpoukelli et al 2021; “AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio”, Guzhov et al 2021

• “Google demonstrates leading performance in latest MLPerf Benchmarks” using TPUv4s

• “Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases”, Dhingra et al 2021 (a nice use of the inline metadata trick to greatly improve T5 temporal knowledge/reasoning—just include more metadata! No fancy new symbolic architectures or training methods. Just provide more useful data.)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Genetic risk factors have a substantial impact on healthy life years”, Jukarainen et al 2022

• “Novel disease associations with schizophrenia genetic risk revealed in ~400,000 UK Biobank participants”, Zhang et al 2021

• “Does Parental Education Influence Child Educational Outcomes? A Developmental Analysis in a Full-Population Sample and Adoptee Design”, Ludeke et al 2021 (“no”)

• “Using genes to explore the effects of cognitive and non-cognitive skills on education and labor market outcomes”, Buser et al 2021

• “The contribution of additive genetic variation to personality variation: heritability of personality”, Dochtermann et al 2015 (“52% of animal personality variation was attributable to additive genetic variation”)

• “Uncovering the Genetic Architecture of Broad Antisocial Behavior through a Genome-Wide Association Study Meta-analysis”, Tielbeek et al 2021

• “Genome-wide association analyses of individual differences in quantitatively assessed reading-related and language-related skills in up to 34,000 people”, Eising et al 2021 (unusually detailed phenotyping)

• “Identifying a living great-grandson of the Lakota Sioux leader Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull)”, Moltke et al 2021 (estimating relatedness using 2,259 SNPs extracted from an 1890_134ya arsenic-preserved sample of Sitting Bull’s hair)

• “Global Biobank Meta-Analysis Initiative: powering genetic discovery across human diseases”, Global Biobank Meta-Analysis Initiative2021 (n = 2.1m)

Recent Evolution:

• “Natural selection contributes to the myopia epidemic”, Long & Zhang2020

Engineering:

• “Facultative Parthenogenesis in California Condors”, Ryder et al 2021

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Sigmoids behaving badly: why they usually cannot predict the future as well as they seem to promise”, Sandberg et al 2021 (Older discussions of this forecasting folklore: 1, 2, 3, 4)

• “Inconsistency in Conference Peer Review: Revisiting the 2014 NeurIPS Experiment”, Cortes & Lawrence2021

Politics/Religion

• “Gender Identity, Coworking Spouses and Relative Income within Households”, Zinovyeva & Tverdostup2021 (better explanations for the ‘gender cliff’ than misogyny)

• “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends”, Best & Horiuchi 1985_39ya (the poisoned-Halloween-candy thing was never real)

• “Obesity of politicians and corruption in post-Soviet countries”, Blavatskyy2020

• “Rule Enforcement Without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown”, Caplow1984

• “Lost in Thought: The psychological risks of meditation”

Psychology/Biology

• “Remembering immunity: Neuronal ensembles in the insular cortex encode and retrieve specific immune responses”, Koren et al 2020 (media)

• “Erosion of the Epigenetic Landscape and Loss of Cellular Identity as a Cause of Aging in Mammals”, Yang et al 2021; “Making sense of the ageing methylome”, Seale et al 2022

• “Blood-based epigenome-wide analyses of cognitive abilities”, McCartney et al 2021 (since the epigenome is further downstream, should be interesting for investigating how genetic & environmental causes of intelligence are, mechanistically, mediated)

• “A collective analysis of lifespan-extending compounds in diverse model organisms, and of species whose lifespan can be extended the most by the application of compounds”, Berkel & Cacan2021 (the ‘everything works in mice’ problem of life extension research)

• “A New Way to Be Mad: The phenomenon is not as rare as one might think: healthy people deliberately setting out to rid themselves of one or more of their limbs…Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?”

• “Echolocating bats rely on an innate speed-of-sound reference”, Amichai & Yovel2021 (raising bats from birth in a helium environment to test nature vs nurture)

• “Attractor and integrator networks in the brain”, Khona & Fiete2021

• “Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture”, Somer et al 2021

• “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: [Toxoplasma Gondii] Parasite Infection is Associated with Entrepreneurial Initiation, Engagement, and Performance”, Lerner et al 2020 (getting increasingly difficult to explain away as a confound)

• “Escape of hair follicle stem cells causes stem cell exhaustion during aging” (hair follicles stop working with age as genes dysregulate & stem cells ‘leak’ out to be killed by the immune system)

Technology

• “Synthetic fat from petroleum as a resilient food for global catastrophes: Preliminary techno-economic assessment and technology roadmap”, Martínez et al 2021; “David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe”

• “2005: Shades of Doom” (Doom for the blind)

• “Ink traps and pals”, Toshi Omagari (challenges of microtypography & computer displays: ink or light runs)

• Railroad torpedo

• “Anti-Orbit Laser Submarines”

• “Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever?”, Fung2021 (an even simpler slower insertion sort; you can make arbitrarily-slow sorting algorithms because you can work on permutations of arbitrary computable functions, but they won’t be as simple); “Coolex: The coolest way to generate combinations”, Ruskey & Williams2009

• Scunthorpe problem

Economics

• “Choices Are Really Bad”, Zvi Mowshowitz

• Spanish Christmas Lottery

• “Hotelling’s law” (why do all those gas stations/coffee shops/pharmacies—or deep learning models…?—cluster together?)

Philosophy

• “The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work”, Lawson2006

• “Donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness”, Caviola et al 2020

• “Elephas Anthropogenus”, Uli Westphal2015 (visualizing the degeneration of medieval European knowledge of what ‘an elephant’ looks like); “Distinguishing Real Vs. Fake Tiger Penises [Identification Guides for Wildlife Law Enforcement No. 6]”, Yates2005

• Norton’s dome

Fiction

Miscellaneous

• The dastardly career of Emmanuel Barthélemy (shot a cop during a failed coup, was exiled after another failed uprising, was responsible for the last fatal duel in England which kill a fellow activist, murdered his employer and then a neighbor after possibly attempting to blackmail him with a fraudulent daughter and while plotting to assassinate Napoleon III; finally convicted, he made blasphemous jokes about his execution & requested Paradise Lost to read. And the one good killing Barthélemy might’ve done, that of Karl Marx—for being too conservative—he failed!)