AI

• “Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress: Preparation requires technical research and development, as well as adaptive, proactive governance”, Bengio et al 2024

• “ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t”; “Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees”

• “Afterword to Vernor Vinge’s novel, True Names”, Minsky 1984_42ya (challenges to preference learning & safe agents)

• “Machine Learning as a Tool for Hypothesis Generation”, Ludwig & Mullainathan 2024

• “The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans”, Tomlinson et al 2024

Matters Of Scale:

• “The Longest Training Run: Training runs of large machine learning systems are likely to last less than 14-15 months. This is because longer runs will be outcompeted by runs that start later” (wait equation)

• “TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be & Still Speak Coherent English?”, Elden & Li 2023 (<0.01b-parameter models can learn & write fluent stories by GPT-4 knowledge-distillation)

• Marvin Minsky, 1970, on why race to AGI: “…the Russians are only about 3 years behind us in AI work. With our system switched off, they would have us at their mercy.”

• “The Saga of Highleyman 1961’s Data”, Hardt & Recht (fulltext; early NN pioneers: radically inadequate data & compute for digit recognition, but powerful methods that scaled as predicted)

• “MLPs Learn In-Context”, Tong & Pehlevan 2024 (good MLP scaling for meta-learning vs Transformers)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Genetic influences on depression and selection into adverse life experiences”, Rauf & Freese 2024

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Heresy, witchcraft, Jean Gerson, skepticism and the use of placebo controls”, Kirakosian et al 2023

Politics/Religion

• “How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals” (and how 3M insiders worked the system of a pathological corporation to eventually expose PFOS)

• The 2013 Chinese rare-earth embargo (users of embargos should always keep in mind that embargos tend to be self-defeating in free markets: short-run elasticities are less than long-run elasticities. Embargos can be a useful weapon in the short run, but in the long-run, “use it & lose it”.)

Psychology/Biology

• “The Persistence and Transience of Memory”, Richards & Frankland 2017; “The fading memories of youth: The mystery of ‘infantile amnesia’ suggests memory works differently in the developing brain”

• “Islands of Genius: Artistic brilliance and a dazzling memory can sometimes accompany autism and other developmental disorders”, Treffert & Wallace 2002_24ya; “Inside the Mind of a Savant”, Treffert & Christensen 2006_20ya (on Kim Peek)

• “The Legend of John von Neumann”, Halmos 1973

• “The Mystery of S., the Man with an Impossible Memory” (Luria’s mnemonist)

• “Crows ‘count’ the number of self-generated vocalizations”, Liao et al 2024 (birds can count out loud)

• “Effects of Semaglutide on Chronic Kidney Disease in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes”, Perkovic et al 2024

  GIP/GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are still on track (even excluding the addiction stuff) to be some of the best things to happen to humanity in my lifetime. You should probably read more about them. (The addiction stuff remains one of the most interesting open questions for psychology & psychiatry right now.)

• “General knowledge norms: Updated and expanded from the Nelson & Narens 1980_46ya norms”, Tauber et al 2013

• “Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders”, Morley & Robert 2018

• Paris syndrome (ouiaboos)

Technology

• SpaceX can cancel vested equity of ex-employees (and also ban them from ever selling any vested equity)

• “‘You Are My Friend’: Early Androids and Artificial Speech”, Jessica Riskin 2024

• “Professor Dr. Style: Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993”

Economics

• “How ECMO Is Redefining Death: A medical technology can keep people alive when they otherwise would have died. Where will it lead?” (heart-lung machines can now keep some alive for months or years—even ambulatory… at staggering costs like $30k/day)

Philosophy

Fiction

Miscellaneous