April 2023 News
April 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
April 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 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
“When and Why Vision-Language Models Behave like Bags-Of-Words, and What to Do About It?”, et al2023 (why CLIP-based image generators like SD/
DALL-E-2 struggle so much with composition compared to Parti etc)
“Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, et al2023 (zero-shot sim2real training of 51cm/
3.5kg humanoid robots)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
“Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field”, et al2023 (homeopathy as the control group for medicine: d ~ 0.3)
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
“A Dynamical Model of General Intelligence: The Positive Manifold of Intelligence by Mutualism”, et al2006; “A Dynamic Systems Model of Cognitive and Language Growth”, van 1991
“A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions”, et al2022
“Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result: Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it” (‘The Chocolate Glacé Is Out Of Control’)
“The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive performance—a randomized controlled study”, et al2023 (null)
Technology
Economics
“Energy Saving May Kill: Evidence from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident”, 2023 (poverty kills, especially energy poverty)
Philosophy
“The Gostak and the Doshes”, Miles J. Breuer (1930; on distimming & scissors); The Gostak: an interactive fiction text game in a made-up language (and world), with semantics learned from syntax
Fiction
Miscellaneous
“An Oral History of ‘Steamed Hams’, the Funniest Simpsons Scene Ever”; “Steaming a Good Ham: How to write a meme in Shakespearean English”, Talia Felix; a selection of “Steamed Hams” videos:
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Suzume (2022; Makoto Shinkai. Now my favorite Shinkai movie. Where most Shinkai movies leave me feeling alienated by the sentiment and emotional manipulation and fetishization of the highschool romance-drama, as well as increasingly stale magical-realism or ‘Shinkai sky’, Suzume swerves left from expectations, and its portrayal of a nontraditional family of aunt & niece is his most genuine work. Nor does it fail to deliver a lot of action & adventure, and enjoyable animation—in particular, watching the cats, I felt sure that whoever was responsible for that must love cats. (Although I am still a little puzzled how the stable time loop is supposed to work: how does the chair get damaged, if Suzume gives it to her younger self in a time loop?) It is regrettable that despite well-earned initial success, that Suzume doesn’t seem to be sticking. I blame the name in part for that: it is one of the worst and least memorable anime movie names ever. Even a literal translation like “Suzume’s Locking Up” would have been better than just “Suzume”. when someone asked me two years later “had I had seen Suzume?”, I drew a blank—that Ghibli movie or TV thing no Westerner ever watches…?—“no, that movie a few years ago” [walking motion with fingers]—“oh, the chair movie, yeah, it was great!”)
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: