Links

Everything is heritable:

• Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for height and body mass index in ~700,000 individuals of European ancestry, Yengo et al 2018 (PGS: 34.7% height, 10.3% BMI)
• A Polygenic Score for Higher Educational Attainment is Associated with Larger Brains, Elliott et al 2018 (confirmation of previous genetic correlations)
• Measuring and Estimating the Effect Sizes of Copy Number Variants on General Intelligence in Community-Based Samples, Huguet et al 2018 (On average, even healthy people carry at least 1 harmful CNV costing them >1 IQ points.)
• A polygenic P factor for major psychiatric disorders, Selzam et al 2018 (likewise unsurprising)
• Phenotype risk scores identify patients with unrecognized Mendelian disease patterns, Bastarache et al 2018 (media; mutation load is much higher than we thought: the population burden of Mendelian disease may be >4x larger than previously estimated)
• Relationships between estimated autozygosity and complex traits in the UK Biobank, Johnson et al 2018 (Inbreeding harm for: fluid intelligence, lung function, & risk of early first sex.)
• Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them, Smith-Woolley et al 2018 (media)
• Mixed model association for biobank-scale data sets, Loh et al 2018 (Attacks only get better: …the total number of independent GWAS loci detected increased from 5,839 to 10,759, an 84% increase)
• Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives [n=13m], Kaplanis et al 2018 (Background; What’s interesting is the total absence of non-additive genetics despite a trait like longevity being the combination of all diseases/health variables.)
• A genetic perspective on the relationship between eudaemonic -and hedonic well-being, Baselmans & Bartels 2018 (amusing)
• A Human Chimera (the photos are remarkable)

• Engineering/selection:

  • Update on HGP-Write’s genome synthesis: plans to synthesize a human Y chromosome, progress on full yeast synthesis
  • DeCODE knows all the Icelandic carriers of the BRCA breast cancer genes, but it’s not allowed to warn them

• Recent human evolution: Novel susceptibility loci and genetic regulation mechanisms for type 2 diabetes, Xue et al 2018

AI:

• Deciphering China’s AI Dream, FHI
• The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities, Lehman et al 2018
• World Models: Can agents learn inside their own dreams?, Ha & Schmidhuber 2018 (Planning & learning in deep environment models; in-browser JS demos for Car Racing/VizDoom!)
• Bayesian Optimization for a Better Dessert, Kochanski et al 2017 (Chocolate chip cookie design via ML)

Politics/religion:

• The Struggle to Build a Massive Biobank of Patient Data (On the failure of the NIH biobank project: diversity and medical ethics are why we can’t have nice things.)
• The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments, Kalla & Broockman 2017
• Randomizing Religion: The Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes, Bryan et al 2018 (How beneficial is religion to individuals?)
• From the Concept of Totipotency to Biofortified Cereals, Potrykus 2015 (The Golden Rice ordeal)
• PredictIt Trump trading: The Wolves of K Street (though negative, it should be praising the traders for not being mindkilled & informing the rest of us; I check PredictIt regularly to cut through hype.)

Psychology/biology:

• Metzinger’s applied philosophy of mind & VR
• 3.4 million real-world learning management system logins reveal the majority of students experience social jet lag correlated with decreased performance, Smarr & Schirmer 2018 (Non-early owl chronotypes still hurt performance in college.)
• Does teaching children how to play cognitively demanding games improve their educational attainment? Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial of chess instruction in England, Jerrim et al 2017 (no)

Technology:

• A Cyberattack in Saudi Arabia Had a Deadly Goal. Experts Fear Another Try. (How big is your TCB, actually? Don’t worry, our chemical plant has mechanisms designed to make it provably physically impossible to endanger it by hacking computers! OK. And where did you get those mechanisms’ blueprints? From a… computer. I see. The CAD machines tell such elegant lines…)
• What the Garbageman Knows

Economics:

• Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure, Dempsey 1996 (after using Uber for 2 weeks to get around SF, I’m impressed how elegantly & effectively the ridesharing system of smartphones+GPSes+two-sided marketplace solves all the historical problems which caused taxis to be regulated (and then degenerate into rent-seeking regulatory capture).)
• Planning Order, Causing Chaos: Transantiago, Munger (Chile’s experience with replacing a privatized highly competitive bus system with a government-run one.)
• Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012 CE, Michaels & Rauch 2016 (You might say this is an example of the costs of a… legacy architecture.)

Fiction:

• Been A Long, Long Time (R. A. Lafferty, 1970; infinite-monkeys theorem)

Books

Nonfiction:

• McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, Gregory 2015 (review; see also Low Aptitude Men in the Military: Who Profits, Who Pays?, Laurence & Ramsberger 1991.)
• Zen Koans, Kubose 1973 (a fairly comprehensive collection going beyond the standard ones, accompanied by some nice commentaries & sumi-e illustrations)
• Japan As Number One: Lessons for America, Vogel 1979 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Ready Player One

  Previous novel review; a streamlined & more tense retelling with most of the ’80s pop culture replaced by ’90s/’00s, presumably because licensing was easier (even Spielberg cannot defy copyright is why we can’t have nice things). In some respects the movie plot is superior to the book as it trims much of the fat, adds a few clever gimmicks, and more drama, thus avoiding the relatively slack book finale where the heroes are safely ensconced in a private mansion, but worse in other respects like the cheesy anti-VR message tacked on Hollywood-style at the end (apparently Spielberg thinks the best argument that can be made for the real world over VR is that you can’t have sex in VR, only in the real world? which is both an insultingly crass & impoverished view of human nature and also a thin empirical reed to rest a defense on). It is excellent to watch on a big screen in 3D despite how silly it ultimately is, so I’m not surprised it’s been successful. I expect it’ll increase interest in VR over the next few years, especially because in some ways the VR tech already feels like the future past (making the real thing less of a letdown): years out of date, big and heavy and requiring wires and clunky haptic suits, compared to current headsets and things on the roadmap for the next decade like vestibular stimulation. Content will remain a challenge; Ready Player One can make each game/scene/world look like, well, a custom action-adventure CGI movie because it is one but real VR games will struggle to invest in the creation of the enormous graphics assets necessary… Futurology-wise, it emphasises my original observation that VR is a terrible metaphor for general computer use and it would be miserable to use a Metaverse/Oasis paradigm for everything - eg spending several minutes walking/flying to a library, bickering with a personified interface, to run a single keyword search on a set of videos which could be done in <5s with a keyboard shortcut.

• Moulin Rouge! (clever but ultimately overly melodramatic; I wished it had kept more to comedy since I felt checked out by the end)

Animated:

• Hells (movie similar to Dead Leaves or Redline, energetically animated but difficult to describe otherwise; a parodic highschool anime take on… the Cain & Abel myth? all jammed together in a fast-paced plot which damages the character development it depends on to glue the madness & non sequiturs together. Nevertheless, I have to give Hells props for being so different.)