August 2023 News
August 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
August 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, July 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
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Gwern.net: indent/justification A/B test finished (usual too-small-to-measure); widescreen-desktop floating section ToC/scrollspy
Links
AI
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“AlphaStar Unplugged: Large-Scale Offline Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2023
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“ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools”, et al 2023 (DL autonomous design & synthesis of chemicals)
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“Diversifying AI: Towards Creative Chess with AlphaZero”, et al 2023 (novelty search by conditioning on an ID variable)
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Profile of Morris Chang and the creation of TSMC (“We control all the choke points. China can’t really do anything if we want to choke them.”)
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“A Sociological Study of the Official History of the Perceptrons Controversy”, Olazaran 199331ya (did Minsky kill connectionism… or did lack of compute & ideas how to train multi-layer NNs kill it first and Perceptrons was just the obituary?)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
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“Genome-wide risk prediction of common diseases across ancestries in one million people”, et al 2023
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“Overcoming attenuation bias in regressions using polygenic indices”, van et al 2023 (how to correct for measurement error in using PGSes)
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science
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“How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?” (on industry labs)
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“Practicing Western Science Outside the West: Personal Observations on the Indian Scene”, 1985
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“Metascience Since 201212ya: A Personal History”, Stuart Buck
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‘Wisdom of the Crowd vs. “the Best of the Best of the Best”’ on Metaculus
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“Experimental Human Scurvy”, Crandon et al 194084ya; “Self-Experimentation in Nutrition Research”, 1993
Politics/Religion
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“Blundering on the Brink: The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis”; “It’s time for a new atomic altruism: Philanthropies are pulling back from programs meant to address the risk of nuclear war—at precisely the wrong moment”
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“Insights into the accuracy of social scientists’ forecasts of societal change”, The Forecasting 2023; “Harm Hypervigilance in Public Reactions to Scientific Evidence”, et al 2023 (censorship Noble Lies fail again)
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“Those Who Said ‘No!’: Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians during World War II”, 1988
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The Moulin Rouge Hotel (the virtue of vice)
Psychology/Biology
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“Centenarian clocks: epigenetic clocks for validating claims of exceptional longevity”, Dec et al 2023
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“Longevity Factor Klotho Enhances Cognition in Aged Nonhuman [Rhesus Macaque] Primates”, et al 2023
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“A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis”, et al 2023; “A high-performance neuroprosthesis for speech decoding and avatar control”, et al 2023
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“The rocky road from actions to intentions”, Newton 199034ya (no one can tell what song you’re humming or tapping)
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“Reflective journal entries using GPT-4 and Obsidian that demand less willpower” by dialogue/queries + annotation + summarization
Technology
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“Vesuvius Challenge: Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano”; Nat Friedman: “Reading Ancient Scrolls, Open Source, & AI”
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“Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly-heavy baryons”, 2017
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“Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability” (level design preference learning: predicting high-quality soluble mazes using human feedback from quitting rates)
Economics
Philosophy
Fiction
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“Killing Time: Dracula and Social Discoordination”, 2014; “Turning Back the Economic Clock: The real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, 2022; “Bram Stoker, Dracula, and Progress Studies”, Tyler Cowen 2022
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“Hiawatha’s Lipid”, 1960
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Never Die Twice (to clarify the ending: similar to Devilman, as this is a retelling of Völuspá, the protagonist has indeed failed to stop the cycle of reincarnation, and merely delayed it; his inability to love anyone but himself dooms his efforts to break free, although—just like the ending of Völuspá with the golden chessboard—we are left with hope that progress has been made due to the exogenous shock of ideas from contemporary Earth isekai-ed in, and that many cycles from now Walter may finally succeed in freeing himself from death for a better reason than just that.)
Miscellaneous
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“The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”, Tyler Vigen
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The Tottenham Outrage: an epic pram chase & shootout
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The Eglinton Tournament: the last medieval tournament
Books
Nonfiction:
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God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne, R. Howard Bloch
Fiction:
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The Book of Fuligin
Film/TV
Live-action:
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Jurassic Park 3D
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The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: