April 2024 News
April 2024 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
April 2024’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2024 (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
Gwern.net: authors are now hyperlinked; Google CSE site-search has been restored (magnifying-glass icon in theme togglebar,
/keybinding); April Fools easter egg
Links
AI
RIP FHI (2005–192024); “Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute: The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk”
The (minimal) implications of chaos theory for reinforcement learning agents
“Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models”, Anwar et al 2024 (research challenges in scaled LLMs)
“Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity”, Cantlon & Piantadosi 2024
A history of Vaswani et al 2017 inside Google: low-level optimization, trial-and-error, defying orthodoxy, and lots of compute & data
“Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data”, Gerstgrasser et al 2024 (model-collapse doesn’t happen if you continue training on real data)
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
“Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven”, Begg et al 2023
Recent Evolution:
Engineering:
“Genetic gains underpinning a little-known strawberry Green Revolution”, Feldmann et al 2024
Statistics/Meta-Science
“They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War” (more on Haldane 1927)
The Rootclaim Debate format is unfit for purpose as it is unable to detect falsified quotes & graphs
Politics/Religion
Psychology/Biology
“Trial of Lixisenatide in Early Parkinson’s Disease”, Meissner et al 2024
“Self-protection as an adaptive female strategy”, Benenson et al 2021
“Night Shifts: Can technology shape our dreams?”, Clune 2022
“Cat Ownership and Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Psychotic-Like Experiences: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, McGrath et al 2023 (don’t worry about the cat/Toxoplasmosis correlation: small, inconsistent age-wise, even without controls, and so almost surely trivial causally)
“Cicadian Rhythm: Insecticides, Infant Health, and Long-term Outcomes”, Taylor 2022
Technology
“Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design”, Ripple 2021 (the classified roots of civilian fusion power & the untapped potential for much more powerful H-bombs); “What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos”, Ashutosh Jogalekar
“A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’” (the in-car map navigation system decades ahead of its time)
“The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web”, Page et al 199828ya (surprisingly relevant, describing some capabilities no longer available like personalized PageRank or PR visualization by URL)
“The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher”, Oranchak et al 2024 (with help from Louie Helm)
Scribe.rip replacement for Medium articles:
freedium.cfd(broken as of 2026)
Economics
“No one buys books: Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin versus DOJ”
“Cocytarchy: Lessons From the American Inferno” (prison gangs & the problem of being judgment-proof)
“When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain”, Kent & Martínez-Marquina 2022
“The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution”, Mankiw & Weinzierl 2010
Philosophy
Fiction
“[Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols]”, Bill Hibbard 2007
Miscellaneous
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
The Bridge (200620ya; review)
Knives Out (2019; a satisfying mystery overall; with only two flaws: first, it is tainted by already-painfully-dated superficial contemporary politics, which attempt to be even-handed but mostly show that the writers cannot pass an intellectual turing test (although given how well-constructed it is overall, I was still surprised to read up on it afterwards and find the director’s prior film was Star Wars: The Last Jedi); and second, one of the most praised (or at least remarked on) aspects was a misstep, in casting Daniel Craig as the eccentric detective: Craig is not a bad actor, but he is too associated with James Bond & England, so I simply could not accept the fake cornpone Southern accent, an accent so jarring that it degraded every scene Craig was in, to the point where characters lampshade it in-movie—making the usual contemporary media mistake of believing that pointing out a mistake in-universe somehow retroactively makes it not a mistake, rather than making the mistake even more egregious, by proving that they realized it was a mistake so far in advance that they could write it into the story but still didn’t fix it)
Animated:
Music
I Have Been A Good Bing, The Fooming Shoggoths
“Chime Design and Build”, Lee Hite
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: