February 2023 News
February 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
February 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, January 2023 (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
Links
AI
“An Invitation to Imitation”, Bagnell 201511ya (tutorial on imitation learning, DAgger etc.—highly relevant to LLMs as they are just imitation-learning RL agents)
“Inside the mind of a superhuman Go model: How does Leela Zero read ladders?”
“SolidGoldMagikarp” and other unspeakable strings for GPT-3 (more BPE pathologies)
“Anime Rock Paper Scissors”, Corridor Digital (making-of; short using actors against Unreal Engine 5 backgrounds + Stable Diffusion style transfer to Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust + finetuned on actors; animators’ commentary)
“ANIME ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS 2” (featuring the circle game; making-of)
What went wrong with MS Bing ‘Sydney’ compared to ChatGPT? MS didn’t RLHF-train it at all
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
“Uncovering the Heritable Components of Multimorbidities and Disease Trajectories: A Nationwide Cohort Study”, Westergaard et al 2023 (n = 6.3m Danes, heritability >1k diseases/genetic correlation on 424 diseases); “Multi-PGS enhances polygenic prediction by combining 937 polygenic scores”, Albiñana et al 2023
“A Little-Known Inflammatory Disease Is Hiding in Plain Sight” (genetic diseases caused by somatic mutations are now being found)
“Identification and analysis of individuals who deviate from their genetically-predicted phenotype”, Hawkes et al 2023 (extreme-case analysis)
Engineering:
“DNA synthesis technologies to close the gene writing gap”, Hoose et al 2023 (review)
“Girl with deadly inherited condition is cured with gene therapy on NHS”
“Changing cancer’s course: How genetic science gave 3 All-American athletes a future” (a PGD success story)
“Public views on polygenic screening of embryos: Understanding moral acceptability and willingness to use is crucial for informing policy”, Meyer et al 2023
“For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest”
Statistics/Meta-Science
“Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project”, Kekecs et al 2023 (methodology testbed: preregistered adversarial collaboration, video-recorded real-time timestamped open data with large well-powered n; no psi found)
Politics/Religion
“Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views”, Jakesch et al 2023; “Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues”, Bai et al 2023 (GPT-3-essays as (in)effective as human-written; but best-of-5 essay curation does better)
Psychology/Biology
“Psychological testing and psychological assessment: A review of evidence and issues”, Meyer et al 200125ya (realistic priors on correlates in psychology)
“Rosenhan revisited: successful scientific fraud”, Scull 2023 (more on the fabricated psychiatry experiment & consequences)
“The Color Currency of Nature”, Humphrey 1976
The Symbion ‘worm’
Technology
“Mineral Oil Cooled PC”, Puget Systems (killed by a patent troll; RIP)
Economics
“For Want of a Cup: The Rise of Tea in England and the Impact of Water Quality on Mortality”, Antman 2022
“The fascinating reason why clowns paint their faces on eggs” (spontaneous order: clown social norms to avoid face-paint art overlap & establish priority)
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Film/TV
Live-action: