Links

Everything is heritable:

• genetic engineering/embryo selection:

  • “US scientists try 1st gene editing [zinc finger nucleases] in the body [of Hunter syndrome]”
  • “Eugenics 2.0: We’re at the Dawn of Choosing Embryos by Health, Height, and More; Will you be among the first to pick your kids’ IQ? As machine learning unlocks predictions from DNA databases, scientists say parents could have choices never before possible.” (Hsu’s embryo selection startup, Genomic Prediction, comes out of stealth)
  • “A baby with a disease gene or no baby at all: Genetic testing of embryos creates an ethical morass” (on deliberately having kids with serious genetic diseases; see previously Slate on Huntington’s disease.)
  • “Every Parent Wants to Protect Their Child. I Never Got the Chance” (on cystic fibrosis & wrongful-birth lawsuits)
  • “Discounts, guarantees and the search for ‘good’ genes: The booming fertility business” (‘Bioethicist’ frustrated they can’t come up with a pretext for outlawing having healthier kids or choosing your mates.)
  • “Compelling Reasons for Repairing Human Germlines”, Church 2017

• “Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?”, Stephens et al 2015 (Are power estimates suggesting we need n=1–2m for IQ GWASes or other traits a cause for pessimism? No; 23andMe and Ancestry.com are doing around that much each year now, and genomics in general continues to follow earlier exponential projections. In another 5–10 years, there may be enough sequencing capacity to sequence the entire global population once, and potentially billions of available cumulative raw genomes. Against that, phenotyping a few million will not be a big deal.)

• UK Biobank begins exome sequencing (UKBB—the gift that keeps on giving.)

• “The company [23andMe] has sold more than 6 million tests for $79 apiece (recently down from $99)” (The genomic revolution will continue until morale improves.)

• The environment is genetic: “The nature of nurture: effects of parental genotypes”, Kong et al 2017; “Estimating heritability without environmental bias”, Young et al 2017 (interesting new method; among other implications, that much of the benefits of embryo selection would be delayed to the next generation, since they will be expressed via better parenting (whatever that is).)

• “Common risk variants identified in autism spectrum disorder”, Grove et al 2017 (ASD begins to pass the sample-size threshold)

• “GWAS for male-pattern baldness identifies 71 susceptibility loci explaining 38% of the risk”, Pirastu et al 2017 (criticism)

• “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; this suggests range restriction and pervasive gene-environment correlation, as indicated by other studies like Belsky et al 2016)

• “Socioeconomic status and genetic influences on cognitive development”, Figlio et al 2017 (More evidence against Turkheimer’s claim that poor people have lower heritability)

• “Singleton Variants Dominate the Genetic Architecture of Human Gene Expression”, Hernandez et al 2017 (Towards finding the rare variant contribution to heritability beyond SNP/LDSC/etc.)

• “The infinitesimal model: Definition, derivation, and implications”, Barton et al 2017 (Why does the Fisher additive model of genetics work so well universally when it must be false?)

AI:

• “A Year [2016] in Computer Vision”, Duffy & Flynn (review of primarily DL progress in 2016 on image classification, object detection/tracking, segmentation, upscaling, 3D geometry estimation, and fundamental CNN & dataset R&D)
• “Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only”, Lample et al 2017 (More CycleGAN-style neural magic)
• “TreeQN and ATreeC: Differentiable Tree Planning for Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Farquhar et al 2017 (deep model-based planning; despite GPU VRAM limiting them to depth-2/3 at most, still helpful)
• “Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search”, Anthony et al 2017 (blog; revised post-AlphaGo-Zero.)
• “Parallel WaveNet: Fast High-Fidelity Speech Synthesis”, van den Oord et al 2017 (blog; very nice use of model compression/distillation to train a fast small WaveNet which can run in realtime)
• “Knowledge Concentration: Learning 100K-category Object Classifiers [n=400m] in a Single CNN”, Gao et al 2017 (CNNs at Google scale)
• “AI Safety Gridworlds”, Leike et al 2017 (blog; benchmarking various safety problems including Armstrong’s camera-problem)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “‘Unbelievable’: Heart Stents Fail to Ease Chest Pain”, of Al-Lamee et al 2017

  500,000+ people annually are operated on to insert stents starting in the 1990s; this surgery was never tested with placebo controls and was based on self-report measurements—rather than hard endpoints like mortality—before being rolled out, despite surgeries failing half the time in placebo-controlled studies (Wartolowska et al 2014, see also Ending Medical Reversal), as doctors thought stents not working was “unbelievable” and US IRBs would have killed a placebo-controlled study of stents as being ‘unethical’. The non-US study found minimal benefit (blinded effect size 1/6th that of non-blinded). Said study is, nevertheless, expected to not affect stent surgeries or IRB standards. As Yudkowsky asks, “Why aren’t they rioting?”

• “Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects”, Eckles & Bakshy 2017 (how often does correlation=causation? Standard correlational estimate w/controls overestimates effect of Facebook experiment by 320%, requires 3700 additional control variables to approximate the randomized effect.)

• “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment”, Blake et al 2014 (Correlation≠causation or, does online advertising actually work?)

Politics/religion:

• “When Will The Earth Try to Kill Us Again?” (reviewing the latest work on volcanic cycles and mass-extinction mechanisms)
• “Is Big Foot Likelier than the Loch Ness Monster? The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works”
• “Lost Exile: The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper”
• “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture”
• How BSO conductor Karl Muck landed in trouble because of the national anthem (another example of the mindless jingoism and tyranny of WWI)

Psychology/biology:

• “The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions”, Falk et al 2013; “Common psychiatric disorders [and violent crime] share the same genetic origin: a multivariate sibling study of the Swedish population”, Pettersson et al 2015 (More interesting Scandinavian population registry results.)
• Lessons from The Biggest Loser: weight loss is hard
• “Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence From Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training”, Sala & Gobet 2017
• “Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability”, Mosing et al 2014
• “The Last of the Iron Lungs” (on the importance of vaccination)
• “The Complicated Legacy Of A Panda Who Was Really Good At Sex”: Pan Pan and panda breeding programs
• “As Winter Sets In, Tiny Shrews Shrink Their Skulls and Brains” (Organisms are under constant evolutionary pressure to be as stupid as they possibly can get away with being.)
• “Michel Jouvet, Who Unlocked REM Sleep’s Secrets, Dies at 91” (modafinil)
• “Runaway Money” (Poverty is not about money etc: the wastrel life of the heir to the Goodnight Moon copyright.)

Technology:

• “TrueBit: A scalable verification solution for blockchains”, Teutsch & Reitwiessner 2017 (Very complex but interesting scheme for safely outsourcing arbitrarily big computations on blockchains)
• “GSMem: Data Exfiltration from Air-Gapped Computers over GSM Frequencies”, Guri et al 2015 (Scary side-channels: turning a computer into a cellphone by simply moving data between RAM and CPU)
• “Hyper-realistic face masks: a new challenge in person identification”, Sanders et al 2017 (The best silicone/latex face masks are now capable of reliably fooling almost all people.)

Economics:

• “Industrial Espionage and Productivity”, Glitz & Meyersson 2017 (Why do countries like East Germany or China engage in so much industrial espionage? Because it works & helps compensate for their own inefficiency.)
• “Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the Twentieth Century”, DeLong 2000
• “Blue-collar wages are surging in the US. Can it last?”
• “The Booming Japanese Rent-a-Friend Business”
• “Scents from a Mall: The Sticky, Untold Story of Cinnabon”
• “X-Men at 25: The Unlikely Story of the Animated Hit No Network Wanted” (on the 1992 X-Men TV series)
• “How to Get Rich Playing Video Games on Twitch: For the stars of the streaming service Twitch, success means working around the clock”

Fiction:

• The Iliad as Lawsuit
• “The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons”/“Meet a Professional Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master from New York City”

Books

Nonfiction:

• The Playboy Interview: Volume II (review)
• Tokyo: A Certain Style (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• The Great Happiness Space:

  cinéma vérité-style documentary on Japanese “host clubs” in Osaka, the much more niche female counterpart to the better known hostess clubs, based entirely on interviews of the “hosts” and their female customers. Like hostess clubs, the business model is nightly companionship/partying in exchange for buying large amounts of overpriced alcoholic beverages; sex is sometimes involved. There apparently are only a few host clubs of the type documented, I believe ~25 is quoted at one point, which is very small compared to the usual East Asian sex worker sectors. The female customers interviewed and profiled are not, as one might expect, older or unattractive women, but often young and attractive to the degree that the hosts themselves are not. (It struck me as odd that the hosts themselves are so physically unremarkable, even unattractive, with bizarre fashion choices and hairstyles, but I think the right interpretation here is that it’s more about being a “costume” and possibly connected with PUA’s ‘peacocking’.) The quoted expenditures are even more eyebrow-raising, as while blowing $200 cash on a special occasion may be justifiable, it’s different when one is spending easily $1000 multiple times a week or higher. Even for young women with no responsibilities & much disposable income who might otherwise be collecting Prada handbags, it’s hard to see how these sums are possible. And what do their boyfriends or families think?

  The documentary lets these questions linger and then halfway through flips the tables: the main female customers—perhaps 70%, one host estimates—are prostitutes! They are going to the host clubs for the emotional connections so severed in their daily work, and of course, it’s possible to raise large sums of cash on a regular basis (at least, for a few years…) to spend on their host club. And for all their protestations of being in love with the hosts, the hosts note that many of the customers frequent multiple host clubs simultaneously, playing at being in love in each one. Naturally, having blown their income on such ephemeral pleasures, they’ll find it that much harder to find any alternative career. So the few Osaka host clubs turn out to be parasitic on the larger ecosystem of hostess clubs/“water trade” in Osaka, fostering a toxic co-dependency between hosts and the customers. Osaka may be somewhat extreme as Japanese cities go due to its sheer size, commercial culture, and sex industry presence (eg Tobita Shinchi); nevertheless.

  No one interviewed appears unaware of the questionable ethics of working at a host club, lending a certain furtiveness to discussion of skills in handling customers & extracting money, and exhorting each other to push harder. But they also defend it too—a particularly moving defense is saved for the end, by one short chubby host who, almost crying, defends the host club institution for providing an escape, for providing human connections, for these lonely people in the big city.

Music

Touhou:

• “Dial Connected” (Linjin feat. Aki; ‘紅 -KURENAI-’ {2009}) [rock]
• “Visions(ARM REMIX)” (Masayoshi Minoshima feat. ayame; lumière ambrée: {R14}) [trance]
• “REDSOUL(LONG)” (Masayoshi Minoshima feat. ayame; lumière ambrée: {R14}) [trance]
• “ReFrain” (Kirin ft. Murasaki Hotaru; Divine Lotus {R14}) [trance]
• “成層圏 (Stratosphere)” (MARIN feat. Anna Hanasaki; Divine Lotus {R14}) [trance]