October 2023 News
October 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
October 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, September 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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Idea: make an ‘InvertOrNot.com’ (a simple, useful, but missing web API)
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Idea: lobby webserial/comic sites to make more use of ‘prefetch’/‘preload’ for faster reading
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Gwern.net: dropcaps: extended to support bitmap graphics, and randomized selection (used in Halloween & Christmas-mode, and for the new ‘dropcats’ dropcap set we made for cat-related pages); improved Halloween & Christmas-mode with generated logos; scrolling now disables popups temporarily
Links
AI
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“Goodhart’s Law in Reinforcement Learning”, et al 2023
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Reward is enough: why AIs don’t need animal-style drives like ‘play’ or ‘sleep’
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The Approximator’s Counter: what is the criterion for LLM criteria?
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
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“Some deaf children in China can hear after gene treatment” (Shanghai Refreshgene Therapeutics success in editing otoferlin)
Statistics/Meta-Science
Politics/Religion
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“Take the Q train: Value capture of public infrastructure projects”, et al 2022
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Large organizations are both extremely competent & incompetent
Psychology/Biology
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“A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Money Priming”, et al 2019 (small effect in unpublished studies, zero in pre-registered studies); “Limited evidence for the effect of red color on cognitive performance: A meta-analysis”, 2020 (more priming effects driven by bias)
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“The Sound and Taste of Materials”, 2014 (should you get gold-plated spoons for ice cream? maybe)
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A simple ‘wrist mobilization’ exercise for wrist pain under compression (eg. pushups/bench press/yoga—I was surprised how much this helped my bench press. I was limited by my wrists more than I realized.)
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Commentary on the Trump classified papers scandal: they are ‘narcissistic trophies’ for ‘narcissist supply’
Technology
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“Maintenance of pig brain function under extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC)”, et al 2023; “William and Mary”, Roald 1960
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“Scrollbars are becoming a problem” by pervasive creation of illusion of completeness (in 2021, I almost skipped COVID vaccination because every time I checked the official government mobile app, the morning slots were full and there were no others; actually, there were plenty of slots—except the scrollbar was invisible! I hope they fixed it after I emailed them, but I wonder how many elderly people were boxed out…)
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“The Pattern of Streets”, 1966
Economics
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“The stock market speaks: How Dr. Alchian learned to build the bomb”, 2014
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“Catṡlechta and other medieval legal material relating to cats”, Murray 200717ya (cf. 2010 on damages in American law)
Philosophy
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“My Left Kidney”, Scott Alexander (on donating his kidney to a stranger)
Fiction
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
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A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown: Essays for a Scientific Age, ed 1962
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
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Back to the Future trilogy: Back to the Future/Back to the Future II/Back to the Future III
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Basic Instinct
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: