Everything Is Heritable:

• “Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height”, Lello et al 2017

  A vindication of Steve Hsu’s predictions: the GWAS lasso works! (Hsu2014/Vattikuti et al 2014/Ho & Hsu2015) The height polygenic score has doubled and now explains the full SNP heritability.

  This has many implications: primarily, polygenic scores are going to start doubling or quadrupling regularly as contemporary datasets (UKBB in particular?) start hitting the threshold. Years of incremental improvements in GWAS will be compressed into single papers. It will be exciting to have polygenic scores for intelligence which explain up to 30% of variance! These IQ PGSes will highly likely be available by 2019, and it’s possible that they could be computed this year in 2017 (depending on whether existing datasets are big enough to push past the threshold, perhaps assisted by genetic correlation techniques like MTAG). Plus, of course, more accurate genetic correlations. Aside from being one last bullet in the head of genetics denialism, it will massively increase the value of embryo selection and genome synthesis. Has it really been only 4 years since Rietveld et al 2013 was published? It feels like so much longer… It’s worth noting that the cumulative number of genomes is substantially larger than the annual output, and the former is what counts; for example, under one set of assumptions with a fixed annual investment and the observed exponential decrease in cost, there will be 5x total genomes than annually produced, so since 23andMe/Ancestry.com are reportedly collecting approaching millions of samples per year… (In a since deleted post: “AncestryDNA alone attracted 1.4 million customers in the fourth quarter of 2016, with an additional two million in the first half of 2017…”) The genome sequencing exponentials have been quite a tiger to ride. Very Kurzweilian: everything important happens near the end.

• “GWAS meta-analysis (n = 279,930) identifies new genes and functional links to intelligence”, Savage et al 2017 (predicts 5.4% variance)

• “GWAS Meta-Analysis of Neuroticism (n = 449,484) Identifies Novel Genetic Loci and Pathways”, Nagel et al 2017 (4.2% of variance; would be particularly interesting target for embryo selection given the extreme genetic correlation with happiness of r_g = -0.68)

• “Genetic analysis of over one million people identifies 535 novel loci for blood pressure”, Evangelou et al 2017

• “Genome-wide association study identifies 112 new loci for body mass index in the Japanese population”, Akiyama et al 2017 (Speaking of rapidly increasing sample sizes: Japan’s BBJ from 2008 is starting to come online with n = 200k, and the BMI results show good genetic correlation with UKBB, so pooling will be useful.)

• “Hidden heritability due to heterogeneity across seven populations”, Tropf et al 2017 (the curse of racial genetic differences for GWASes: “Missing heritability” isn’t, but naive GCTA/GWAS estimates are biased downward by heterogeneity in measurements)

• “Genetic Diversity Turns a New PAGE in Our Understanding of Complex Traits”, Wojcik et al 2017; “Multiethnic Meta-analysis Identifies New Loci for Pulmonary Function”, Wyss et al 2017 (The blessing of racial genetic differences for sophisticated GCTA/GWASes: many differences in gene frequencies, linkage disequilibrium patterns, environments, enabling more powerful GWASes. Don’t fear the population structure, benefit from it!)

Recent Evolution:

• human:

  • “Identifying genetic variants that affect viability in large cohorts”, Mostafavi et al 2017 (media)

  • “Linkage disequilibrium-dependent architecture of human complex traits shows action of negative selection”, Gazal et al 2017 (high mutation load and ongoing purifying/negative selection against variants affecting puberty/anorexia/autism/blood pressure/BMI/celiac disease/Crohn’s disease/breast size/hair curl/heel score/height/gray hair/lung capacity/baldness/cirrhosis/arthritis/schizophrenia/shoe size/unibrow)

  • “Quantification of frequency-dependent genetic architectures and action of negative selection in 25 UK Biobank traits”, Schoech et al 2017 (mutation load & purifying/negative selection within 25 UKBB traits: larger effects of rarer variants, but rare variants continue to disappoint by not accounting for much variance in total. Traits: puberty/blood pressure/BMI/bone mineral density/lung capacity/height/smoking/waist-hip ratio/allergic eczema/asthma/college education/hypertension/11 blood panel traits)

  • “Harnessing ancient genomes to study the history of human adaptation”, Marciniak & Perry2017

  • Recent human evolution (<8000 years) and between-group genetic differences: “Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure”, Skoglund et al 2017

  • “The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans”, Dannemann & Kelso2017 (UKBB-wide phenome scan of Neanderthal ancestry—relatively minor effects, few consistent trends)

• animal:

  • “Demographic history, selection and functional diversity of the canine genome”, Ostrander et al 2017

  • “Signatures of positive selection and local adaptation to urbanization in white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus)”, Harris & Munshi-South2017 (city mice adapting to eat human food?)

Engineering:

• “Beyond editing to writing large genomes”, Chari & Church2017

• “China sprints ahead in CRISPR therapy race: Human trials are using the genome-editing technique to treat cancers and other conditions”, Normile2017-10-6

• “We Don’t Want to Know What Will Kill Us: Years of data on genetic testing reveal that when given the option, most people want less information, not more” (The terrifying strength of the desire for genetic relatedness & baby lust: people will deliberately have Huntington’s babies if necessary in order to have a genetically-related child.)

“Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era”, Sun et al 2017 (blog; good to know more data keeps helping, but it will be a long time before anyone, even Google, truly needs corpuses of 300M+ images—although ‘a long time’ apparently turned out ot be only ~3 years and scaling papers keep coming out)

“Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classification: A Comprehensive Review”, Rawat & Wang2017

“Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness”, Foerster et al 2017 (blog)

“Towards personalized human AI interaction—adapting the behavior of AI agents using neural signatures of subjective interest”, Shih et al 2017 (Preference learning: training a deep RL agent using EEG signals of human interest in actions)

“Deep TAMER: Interactive Agent Shaping in High-Dimensional State Spaces”, Warnell et al 2017 (preference learning)

“The Uncertainty Bellman Equation and Exploration”, O’Donoghue et al 2017

PaintsTransfer/style2paints (even better anime colorization/style-transfer, with less watercolor effect)

“Dissolving the Fermi Paradox”, Sandberg et al 2017 slides (the mean estimate of the Drake equation may be high but the distribution is wide and the median is much smaller than the mean, somewhat akin to Jensen’s inequality/inequality of arithmetic and geometric means; see also leaking pipelines)

“Better Decision Making in Drug Development Through Adoption of Formal Prior Elicitation”, Dallow et al 2017

“Very large treatment effects in randomized trials as an empirical marker to indicate whether subsequent trials are necessary: meta-epidemiological assessment”, Nagendran et al 2016 (Small-study biases & medical reversal: even the most dramatic effects in small trials routinely fail to replicate and are only weakly predictive of there being any effect at all.)

“On the Reproducibility of Psychological Science”, Johnson et al 2016

“Disappointing findings on Conditional Cash Transfers as a tool to break the poverty cycle in the United States” (The null is expected since their previous RCT failed (their p-hacking and selective focus notwithstanding), but it’s particularly troubling to see results inflated by self-reported data; as the US is not Scandinavia, many studies depend on self-report.)

“Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution”, Kuran1989 (Speaking of information cascades and common knowledge…)

• “How Stalin Hid Ukraine’s Famine From the World: In 1932 and 1933, millions died across the Soviet Union—and the foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe” (A failed information cascade: all the Western journalists knew about Stalin’s genocidal famine and failed economics, but even a front page expose in multiple newspapers based on scores of interviews was not enough to break their censorship.)

“The Past, Present, and Future of the Human Family”, Hrdy2001 (On infanticide and human values.)

“How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru”, McMillan & Zoido2004

“Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception”, Rey2009; “Meet The ‘Young Saints’ Of Bethel Who Go To College To Perform Miracles: How a school that calls itself ‘Christian Hogwarts’ is upending a small city in California’s Trump country” (compare and contrast)

“Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434”, Padgett & Ansell1993 (Florentine network structures, Bonapartism/Trumpism, contradictory powerbases, and option-value)

“Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis”, Levine et al 2017 (media; see also the Darwinian organismal performance assay)

“Cancer’s Invasion Equation: We can detect tumors earlier than ever before. Can we predict whether they’re going to be dangerous?” (cancer/inflammation come up; may be related to why baby aspirin reduces all-cause mortality, probably through reduced cancer)

“Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors”, Carhart-Harris & Nutt2017 (An attempt at a grand unified theory of psychedelics/depression/SSRI/serotonin hypothesis; SSC discussion)

“Metformin reduces all-cause mortality and diseases of ageing independent of its effect on diabetes control: A systematic review and meta-analysis”, Campbell et al 2017 (note: RR 0.93=~0.8 years life expectancy)

“Association of Lithium in Drinking Water With the Incidence of Dementia”, Kessing et al 2017b (inverse)

“No Beneficial Effects of Resveratrol on the Metabolic Syndrome: A Randomized Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial”, Kjær et al 2017 (A big resveratrol null: zero effect, even evidence of harm.)

“My Father The Werewolf” (on depression)

“The Relationship of Bilingualism Compared to Monolingualism to the Risk of Cognitive Decline or Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”, Mukadam et al 2017

“What Were They Thinking? Samuel A. Stouffer and The American Soldier”, Ryan2009 (One of the largest social science studies ever done, the Research Branch in WWII was set up over officers’ objections and surveyed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, making many surprising findings, and considerably changing the organization of the US military.)

• “The American Soldier—An Expository Review”, Lazarsfeld1949

“Books 1923–1941 Now Liberated!”, Internet Archive; “Creating a Last Twenty (L20) Collection: Implementing §108(H) in Libraries, Archives and Museums”, Gard2017. (A takes an unexpectedly bold step towards ending the orphan copyright deadweight problem by exploiting a copyright provision/loophole I’ve never even heard of before: §108(h) of the 1976 Copyright Right Act, allowing libraries to legally scan & distribute works in their final 20 years of copyright which are not in “normal commercial exploitation” ie hard to get, to an unspecified degree.)

“Cryptology and Physical Security: Rights Amplification in Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks”, Blaze2003 (cryptographic attacks offline; see also Blaze2004a, “Safecracking for the computer scientist”, Blaze2004b)

“How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World”

“The tech of Terminator 2—an oral history” (movie SFX, even as recently as 1991, were incredibly labor-intensive and difficult; see also general oral history)

“Globalfoundries: Next-generation chip factories will cost at least $10 billion”

“How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?” (The moral imperative of economic growth: the Industrial Revolution—the only important event in the history of human welfare.)

“Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, Bloom et al 2020

“Value of Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) Information: Cost-Effectiveness-Based Approach for GCR Reduction”, Barrett2017

“Later school start times in the U.S.: An economic analysis”, Hafner et al 2017

“Islam and Economic Performance: Historical and Contemporary Links”, Kuran2018 (More on perpetuities and the harms of long-term charities)

“The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders”, Anker et al 2017 (National DNA databases are a security, privacy, and totalitarian nightmare, but at least they’ll be amazing for biology & crime.)

“An Autopsy of Cooperation: Diamond Dealers and the Limits of Trust-Based Exchange”, Richman2017 (The India example is striking. So the Indian government decides to subsidize exports (in the hopes of helping the poor by spurring economic development) by forcing companies to make subsidized loans; this winds up primarily benefiting the… diamond cutting industry, subsidizing sales to rich foreigners. Well done, statists. I am probably being insufficiently cynical about Indian politics by assuming this is unintentional and due to anti-market prejudices & ignorance rather than deliberate due to the usefulness of diamonds for bribery, smuggling, & corruption.)

“Techniques of Systems Analysis”, Kahn & Mann1957: many insightful comments about designing systems, applying statistics, pitfalls of optimization, option value, etc.

“Wireheading Done Right: Stay Positive Without Going Insane” (Qualia Computing)

“Simon Browne: the soul-murdered theologian”, Berman1996 (“The Zombie Preacher of Somerset”)

“The Secret History of Dune” (Islamic Caucasian resistance to Russian imperialism in the 1800s)

“Hugh Hefner Esquire Interview”, April 2013 (‘Willy Wonka: “But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted.” Charlie: “What’s that?” Willy Wonka: “He lived happily ever after.”’)

The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third, Luttwak 2016 (review)

The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Provine 1971/2001

Moby Dick (review)

Cool Hand Luke (review)

The Terminator

Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin (much longer than The Gold Rush; like The Gold Rush, it suffers from the transition to comedy & satire to serious drama, in this case, about the Great Depression. The opening factory sequence is great, as is the Little Tramp’s singing performance in the cafe, but everything in between is a slog.)

Listen To Me Marlon (review)

The Gold Rush (1925/1942), Charlie Chaplin (holds up better than I expected but still probably not recommended. Comedic timing has changed as a number of scenes I thought should have gone on longer and elaborated more on their theme were too curtailed, and the attempt at introducing halfway in a dramatic arc/love story falls flat as overly sentimental & pompous—the movie should stick to its knitting, the comedy. The best scene by far is the “dance of the bread rolls”.)

Zootopia (Excellently executed, but the worldbuilding is more baffling the longer you think on it so probably better not to—the only things that would make it make sense would also turn it into a 1984-esque dystopia where the ending and The Moral of the Story is akin Winston Smith realizing “I love Big Brother”.)

K-On! Movie 2011 (beautifully animated but hopelessly bland despite a sweet ending; I suppose that’s an apt description of the entire K-On! franchise but I was hoping that the movie could do more.)

“Stardust” (平茸; Touhou Six String 04.儚 {C92}) [post-rock]

“Day and Night [Eris’s Seek-out mix]” (Eris feat. Vivienne; Rising Nebula {C92}) [electronic/trance]

“Our dreams alight here as we board this train towards nowhere” (fumo; photoframefiction {C92}) [post-rock]

“How precious death, how senseless life” (fumo; photoframefiction {C92}) [post-rock]

“Voices in my Heart[Pf ver]” (霖; Perpetual Stuff {R14}) [Jpop]

“Popping Tonight！” (こばきょん feat. 野宮あゆみ; なないろデスティニー {R14}) [electronic/dance]

“Root of Root” (Harito; Hexe Herz {C92}) [folk]

“Feel My Energy” (kors k vs DJ SHIMAMURA feat. Lexi; Battle Royale {C92}) [techno/hardcore]

“Fusion Device” (Casual Killer; Back to Summer :again {C92}) [electronic/synthwave]

“Blue Lagoon” (Clean Tears; Moments of Passage {C92}) [house]

“Heartbeats” (night works feat. Gumi; Millenary Note {VM15}) [trance]

“Walking Fish” (night works feat. Gumi; Millenary Note {VM15}) [electronic]