Links

Everything is heritable:

• “Genome-wide meta-analysis associates HLA-DQA1/DRB1 and LPA and lifestyle factors with human longevity”, Joshi et al 2017; “Biological Insights Into Muscular Strength: Genetic Findings in the UK Biobank”, Tikkanen et al 2017
• “Genome-wide association study of social relationship satisfaction: loci and correlations with psychiatric conditions”, Warrier et al 2017
• “CNV-association meta-analysis in 191,161 European adults reveals new loci associated with anthropometric traits”, Macé et al 2017 (Some interestingly large effects here.)
• “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Household Financial Distress”, Xu et al 2017
• “The molecular genetics of participation in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children”, Taylor et al 2017 (GWASes show everything is heritable, including participating in GWASes)
• “‘Obedience to traditional authority’: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness”, Ludeke et al 2013; “Genes, psychological traits and civic engagement”, Dawes et al 2015
• One interesting bit of behavioral genetics: identical twin correlations are sometimes argued to be just because of how other people treat them based on their appearance. But we know this is false because of “look-alikes”: totally unrelated people who happen to look identical, nevertheless, are no more similar on personality or other measures. Nancy Segal has identified a number of look-alikes and discusses how they differ dramatically from identical twins: background/history, Segal 2013a, Segal et al 2013b
• “Heritability of schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum based on the nationwide Danish Twin Register”, Hilker et al 2017 (Measurement error due to censoring biases schizophrenia heritability down by 5%)
• “Cross-sectional association between soda consumption and BMI in a community-based sample of twins”, Eney et al 2017 (Correlation is not causation: Fat people are more likely to drink soda, but the fatter twin in a pair is not more likely to drink soda; so soda/obesity appears to be largely confounded, perhaps by more generic eating or exercise tendencies)
• “Brain structure mediates the association between height and cognitive ability”, Vuoksimaa et al 2017
• “Why are children in the same family so different from one another?”, Plomin & Daniels 1987
• “Genetic influences on measures of the environment: a systematic review”, Kendler & Baker 2006 (The environment is genetic too.)
• “Horse Clones Start Heading to the Races: The polo world has already sent in the clones. They’re likely to perform at the next Olympics, too”

AI:

• 

  “Mastering The Game of Go without Human Knowledge”, Silver et al 2017:

  Detailed commentary; the final hurrah of the now-closed DM research programme, AlphaGo Zero is trained from scratch without any human data using pure self-play to truly superhuman levels of Go play, far surpassing AlphaGo Sedol, using an order of magnitude less computing power; the key ingredient appears to be a breakthrough in stabilizing self-play, by training the NN’s value estimates, each move, towards the value estimates as finetuned by a MCTS search. This provides improved estimates, but also (somehow?) manages to prevent catastrophic forgetting and provides incredibly stable self-play training. It may be clearer to read the independent invention of “Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search”, Anthony et al 2017, as well as “Learning Generalized Reactive Policies using Deep Neural Networks”, Groshev et al 2017. Self-play has been underused in deep RL because it is so hard to stabilize despite being a seductively general technique, and despite the limitation of requiring a MCTS-able setting, I think this may turn out to be a big breakthrough for deep RL, and perhaps in the long run more important than the original AlphaGo paper.

• “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation”, Karras et al 2017 (source; video; GANs generating photorealistic 1024x1024px faces, better than StackGAN++ This jumps right over the uncanny valley to, for many of these, I can no longer tell the difference)

• “PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing”, Hitaj et al 2017 (GANs will be much slower than the rule-based or Markov chain generators currently used, but that matters less for long passwords where you can’t hope to brute force them normally and you rely on good guessing. Passwords were already dead, and this emphasizes it.)

• “Where’s Waldo, Terminator Edition” (finding Waldo in very large images using image segmentation CNNs)

• “What does a convolutional neural network recognize in the moon?”, Shoji 2017

• How Buzzfeed used random forests & airplane data to find domestic US spy planes

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “‘Peer review’ is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?”; “Peer Review: The end of an error?”
• “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, Thompson et al 2017 (media)
• “The Number Of Killings In Southern Rural Norway, 1300-1569”, Kadane & Næshagen 2013 (Unusual applications of capture-recapture statistics.)

Politics/religion:

• “Randomized Controlled Trial of the Metropolitan Police Department Body-Worn Camera Program”/“A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations” (A large pre-registered randomized trial of police bodycams shows tiny effects at best despite extremely promising initial results in other places & experiments. Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero”; the Stainless Steel Law: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”)
• “The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics”
• “Hating on Herbert Hoover: He was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an extraordinarily effective humanitarian. How come we remember him as a failure?”
• “The Creative Personality and the Ideal Pupil”, Torrance 1969

Psychology/biology:

• “The limitations of the backfire effect”, Haglin 2017 (the “backfire effect” apparently picks up its 4th failure to replicate.)
• “Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not?”, Kennedy & Read 2017
• “Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory”, Drucker 2010
• Why Gifted Girls Tend to Favor Non-STEM Careers, Jussim
• “Promethea Unbound” (The strange and unfortunate saga of a child prodigy; also illustrates the curse of curiosity, lack of ambition, and ‘culture of poverty’.)
• “Giftedness and Genius: Crucial Differences”, Jensen 1996
• “A Nobel for Cryo-EM”: an explainer
• “Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels”, Annalyn et al 2017 (If you are wondering—for signaling purposes—which genres correlate the most with the generally perceived as “healthy” personality dimensions (low Neuroticism, high Agreeableness/Extraversion/Openness/Conscientiousness), that would seem to be: religion, philosophy, and self-help; and conversely, the worst genres are: paranormal/comics/drama/memoir/graphic novels/young adult/manga—especially manga.)
• “Lessons from Bar Fight Litigation” (eye witness unreliability)
• “On The Rheology of Cats”, Fardin 2014 (a 2017 Ig Nobel Prize winner; demonstrates cats can be modeled as complex fluids, solids, and gases. Another winner is “Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins”, Martini et al 2015.)

Economics:

• “Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis”, Nutt et al 2010
• “How the Elderly Lose Their Rights: Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent-and reap a profit from it”
• “Lending without creditor rights, collateral, or reputation—The ‘trusted-assistant’ loan in 19th century China”, Miao et al 2017 (A most peculiar evolved institution.)
• The subsidization, invention, and marketing of “Bailey’s Irish Cream”

Philosophy:

• “Gender and Philosophical Intuition”, Buckwalter & Stich 2013

Misc:

• BBC News in Pidgin

Books

Nonfiction:

• Artificial Life, Levy
• Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, Dobzhansky 1973

Fiction:

• Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen monk Shōtetsu, Steven D. Carter
• Twig, Wildbow (better than Pact, focusing on small-group dynamics, but I found the ultimately political arc less interesting than the worldbuilding which is mostly discarded halfway through, a number of subplots whimpering out, and Wildbow succumbs to pacing problems halfway again like in Pact & Worm, with several long dull arcs which badly need to be cut down to size)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Blade Runner 2049 (one of the best movies I’ve seen all year, well worth paying to see on the big screen, and a great sequel to Blade Runner. It manages to avoid the crack-cocaine-like pacing of most big Hollywood blockbusters, is visually stunning and a match for Blade Runner’s visual flair, borrows interesting elements from Her & the Star Wars sequels, and the story is excellent to boot—a subtle meditation on love and parenthood. Is the love of a dog or AI or several replicants any less meaningful for being designed?)

Music

Touhou:

• “Dreaming Again -T.V. Million Glittering Stars Remix” (Tim Vegas feat. SYO; Double Key {C83}) [electropop]