AI

• “Goodhart’s Law in Reinforcement Learning”, Karwoski et al 2023

Matters Of Scale:

• Reward is enough: why AIs don’t need animal-style drives like ‘play’ or ‘sleep’

• The Approximator’s Counter: what is the criterion for LLM criteria?

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Some deaf children in China can hear after gene treatment” (Shanghai Refreshgene Therapeutics success in editing otoferlin)

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “How Newton Discovered the Law of Gravitation”, Miller 1951

Politics/Religion

• “Take the Q train: Value capture of public infrastructure projects”, Gupta et al 2022

• Large organizations are both extremely competent & incompetent

Psychology/Biology

• “Tirzepatide after intensive lifestyle intervention in adults with overweight or obesity: the SURMOUNT-3 phase 3 trial”, Wadden et al 2023

• “A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of Money Priming”, Lodder et al 2019 (small effect in unpublished studies, zero in pre-registered studies); “Limited evidence for the effect of red color on cognitive performance: A meta-analysis”, Gnambs 2020 (more priming effects driven by bias)

• “Understanding a Mutually Destructive Relationship Between Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder and Their ‘Favorite Person’”, Jeong et al 2022

• “Book Review: Going Infinite”, Zvi Mowshowitz

• “The Sound and Taste of Materials”, Laughlin & Howes 2014_12ya (should you get gold-plated spoons for ice cream? maybe)

• 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.)

• “The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes”, Uenoyama et al 2021

• Commentary on the Trump classified papers scandal: they are ‘narcissistic trophies’ for ‘narcissist supply’

Technology

• “Maintenance of pig brain function under extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC)”, Shariff et al 2023; “William and Mary”, Roald Dahl 1960

• “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… In other cases, users have reported to me ‘broken’ PDFs missing half the pages—which had two-page spreads whose existence was hidden by the disappearing scrollbars, to the point where it fooled me and I wasted half an hour checking every step in my PDF pipeline trying to figure out where the pages were being deleted.)

• “The Pattern of Streets”, Alexander 1966

Economics

• “Effectiveness of an Over-the-Counter Self-fitting Hearing Aid Compared With an Audiologist-Fitted Hearing Aid: A Randomized Clinical Trial”, De Sousa et al 2023

• “The stock market speaks: How Dr. Alchian learned to build the bomb”, Newhard 2014

• “Catṡlechta and other medieval legal material relating to cats”, Murray 2007_19ya (cf. Berry 2010 on damages in American law)

Philosophy

• “My Left Kidney”, Scott Alexander (on donating his kidney to a stranger)

Fiction

• Studio Ghibli sold to Nippon TV

Miscellaneous