Links

Everything is heritable:

• Evolution:

  • Divergent Ah receptor ligand selectivity during hominin evolution, Hubbard et al 2016 (Evolution to tolerate smoke poisoning, 350-45kya)
  • Genetic Markers of Human Evolution Are Enriched in Schizophrenia, Srinivasan et al 2016 (Our evolution is not yet complete: evolution is still working out the kinks. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for it to finish the job.)
  • Genetic Associations Between Personality Traits and Lifetime Reproductive Success in Humans, Berg et al 2016 (contemporary selection for personality traits)
  • How cognitive genetic factors influence fertility outcomes: A mediational SEM analysis, Woodley et al 2016 (More on dysgenics in the USA: mostly mediated through education’s effects on fertility.)
  • Humans Never Stopped Evolving: The emergence of blood abnormalities, an adult ability to digest milk, and changes in our physical appearance point to the continued evolution of the human race
  • Rapid evolutionary response to a transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils, Epstein et al 2016 (quick evolution through soft selection sweeps)
• Phenome-wide Heritability Analysis of the UK Biobank, Ge et al 2016 (SNP heritability for 551 complex traits)
• Identification of 15 genetic loci associated with risk of major depression in individuals of European descent, Hyde et al 2016
• Associations between Polygenic Risk for Psychiatric Disorders and Substance Involvement, Carey et al 2016
• Genetic Prediction of Male Pattern Baldness, Hagenaars et al 2016 (baldness GCTA of 52%, and GWAS with 250 new hits from the UK Biobank.)
• Sweet Taste Perception is Associated with Body Mass Index at the Phenotypic and Genotypic Level, Hwang et al 2016
• Analysis of Intellectual Disability Copy Number Variants for Association With Schizophrenia, Rees et al 2016 (more on the pervasive genetic overlap between mental illnesses/intellectual problems)
• Heritability and causal reasoning, Lynch 2016
• Genes, Evolution and Intelligence, Bouchard 2014

• Prevalence of Congenital Amusia, Peretz & Vuvan 2016

Politics/religion:

• Evolution is Not Relevant to Sex Differences in Humans Because I Want it That Way! Evidence for the Politicization of Human Evolutionary Psychology, Geher & Gambacorta 2016
• Science Is Not AlwaysSelf-Correcting: Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence, Cofnas 2015 (scientific endorsement of the Noble Lie) Academia, liberalism, and propensity to blank slate beliefs like believing hens & roosters differ due to nurture:
• Insane. Invisible. In danger. Florida cut $100 million from its mental hospitals. Chaos quickly followed
• The Drugs Won: The Case for Ending the Sports War on Doping
• Incorruptibly Evil
• Is God an Accident?
• The Lie Factory: How politics became a business
• Intelligence challenged people and free speech
• Stanislav Petrov

AI:

• Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients, Jaderberg et al 2016 (DeepMind explainer; potentially allows for extreme parallelization of neural nets across GPUs)
• Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?, Lin & Tegmark 2016 (Tegmark tries to explain from a physics perspective why deep learning works.)
• Densely Connected Convolutional Networks, Huang et al 2016 (A new twist on highway/residual/fractal networks, with further records set on image tasks.)
• How To Save Mankind From The New Breed of Killer Robots (Tool AIs want to become agent AIs.)
• Apprenticeship learning using Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Statistics/meta-science:

• How Multiple Imputation Makes a Difference, Lall 2016 (many political science results biased & driven by treatment of missing data)
• Fundamental theorem of poker
• Dynamic Programming in Python: Bayesian Blocks

Psychology/biology:

• Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes, Sariaslan et al 2016 (Terrifyingly large within-family estimates, and the risk increases with age in adolescence.)
• Heads or tails: the impact of a coin toss on major life decisions and subsequent happiness, Levitt 2016 (You can randomize anything if you’re sufficiently clever about it - even having babies, quitting jobs, moving, or starting a business. Arguably, like computer chess or comfort zone expansion, this suggests humans may be too risk-averse: the people on the margin, the 6% who apparently could be swayed by a coin flip, should be making these decisions more often, suggesting a bias towards the status quo.)
• The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments, Gibson et al 2016 (Many traits are stable. Migrants aren’t going to become more patient, intelligent, peaceful, pro-capitalism, or long-term oriented just because they’ve immigrated to your country.)
• To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep, Gillen-O’Neel et al 2013
• We Add Near, Average Far

Technology:

• Strategy Letter V (Reminder: Android vs iPhone, Oculus vs Vive, Microsoft vs Apple, Facebook vs media, Twitter vs API users, Amazon vs anything - everything in SV is ruled by commoditize your complement and low marginal costs.)
• DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with a Malicious Proof-of-Work, Wustrow & VanderSloot 2016 (Who knew HTTPS connections could provide third-party-verifiable signatures and so HTTPS is a valid Proof-of-Work and one can incentivize creating HTTPS connections and hence DDoSes?)
• Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?, SalahEldeen & Nelson 2012
• Learnable Programming: Designing a programming system for understanding programs

Economics:

• The Case Against Everyone’s Favorite Tax Break: The Mortgage Interest Deduction
• Fair Division of Black-Hole Negentropy: an Introduction to Cooperative Game Theory
• Arbitrage and equilibrium in the Team Fortress 2 economy
• Open-access deal for particle physics: Consortium brokers agreement with 12 journals
• Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already?

Philosophy:

• Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom
• Covert virtue - the signal that doesn’t bark?
• Let Us Give To Future
• Alarm Bell Phrase

Fiction:

• The Mongolian Wizard: Day of the Kraken, Michael Swanwick
• Villon’s Straight Tip To All Cross Coves

Misc:

• Detailed Discussion of Legal Rights and Duties in Lost Pet Disputes, Berry 2010 (lost/abandoned pets are surprisingly complex legally)
• What was it like to try a rat? (Comparative Jurisprudence, part 1)
• Tendril perversion (An uncommon name for a common phenomenon; investigated by no less than Charles Darwin.)
• WSJ hedcut

Books

Nonfiction:

• Fortune’s Formula, Poundstone 2005 (review)
• The Future of Machine Intelligence: Perspectives from Leading Practitioners, ed Beyer 2016 (short 80pg ebook of interviews with ML experts; some are notable, like Ilya Sutskever, some much less so (an evolutionary computation guy? what has that field done in years?) but all interviews are so short, ~5 pages, that they hardly get into any depth, and it’s a waste of time.)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Marty (1955) (while extraordinarily lauded at the time, and one of the first American films to be officially shown in the USSR post-WWII, I had never heard of Marty. It is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of an archetype which usually is excoriated and made the butt of all jokes in movies, the omega male - a socially awkward and unmarried loser. It also gives a strong sense of time, location, and community in making the main characters 1950s Italian-Americans in NYC’s The Bronx. The plot is simplicity: the awkward Marty is repeatedly hectored into socializing until by chance he encounters a shy woman who he gets along with, only for his friends & family to reconsider how Marty’s success would harm them, and Marty overcomes their opposition and his own fears to continue the relationship. The point is more to watch Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair act their way through it in an enjoyable fashion, although I think much of the humor is too dated to amuse now.)

Anime:

• The Wind Rises (review)
• The Dog of Flanders (a classic anime children’s movie; aside from the unusual Belgian setting, not too much to recommend it for adults - cardboard characters and almost excruciatingly slow, with a few missteps like failing to establish chronology so the main character’s eviction by Christmas comes as a total surprise because the viewer still thinks it’s autumn)