Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Repurposing large health insurance claims data to estimate genetic and environmental contributions in 560 phenotypes”, Lakhani et al 2019 (56k twin pairs & 724k sibling pairs; see also Polubriaginof 2016)
  • “Multivariate genome-wide analyses of the well-being spectrum”, Baselmans et al 2019
  • “Identification of 12 genetic loci associated with human healthspan”, Zenin et al 2019
  • “Genome-wide analysis reveals extensive genetic overlap between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and intelligence”, Smeland et al 2019 (why is BPD only slightly negatively genetically correlated with IQ? lots of positive SNPs canceling out most of the negatives)
  • “A global view of pleiotropy and genetic architecture in complex traits”, Watanabe et al 2018
  • “Genome-wide meta-analysis [n=807k] of depression identifies 102 independent variants and highlights the importance of the prefrontal brain regions”, Howard et al 2019
  • “Association studies of up to 1.2 million individuals yield new insights into the genetic etiology of tobacco and alcohol use”, Liu et al 2019
  • “Genome wide meta-analysis identifies genomic relationships, novel loci, and pleiotropic mechanisms across eight psychiatric disorders”, PGC Cross-Disorder Group et al 2019
  • “I Was a 4-Year-Old Trapped in a Teenager’s Body” (toxic masculinity: the devastating consequences of “familial male-limited precocious puberty”)

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Highly Heritable and Functionally Relevant Breed Differences in Dog Behavior”, MacLean et al 2019; “Absolute brain size predicts dog breed differences in executive function”, Horschler et al 2019
  • “An evolutionary compass for detecting signals of polygenic selection and mutational bias”, Uricchio et al 2019 (long-term net selection for higher EA, lower BMI)
  • “Cat of the Pharaohs: The African Wild Cat from Past to Present”, Smithers 1968 (short account of raising tamed African wild cats and their differences from domesticated cats; with cute photos)

• Engineering:

  • “Livestock 2.0—genome editing for fitter, healthier, and more productive farmed animals”, Tait-Burkard et al 2018
  • “Synthetic glycolate metabolism pathways stimulate crop growth and productivity in the field”, South et al 2019
  • “Super-Mendelian inheritance mediated by CRISPR-Cas9 in the female mouse germline”, Grunwald et al 2019 (media; gene drive demonstrated in mammals)
  • “The Century-Long Scientific Journey of the Affordable Grocery Store Orchid”
  • A short history of the idea of ‘iterated embryo selection’ (independently invented at least 4 times since 1998)
  • “Linking a mutation to survival in wild mice”, Barrett et al 2019 (media; reverse-engineering the response to selection in mice evolved in wild enclosures)

AI:

• “AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II” (discussion; AmA)
• “Designing neural networks through neuroevolution”, Stanley et al 2019 (review of recent competition & crossover with DL/DRL)
• “Forecasting Transformative AI: An Expert Survey”, Gruetzemacher et al 2019 (ICML/IJCAI/HLAI conference surveys: substantial acceleration of AI timelines)
• “ChauffeurNet: Learning to Drive by Imitating the Best and Synthesizing the Worst”, Bansal et al 2018 (Google/Waymo on imitation learning for self-driving cars: RNNs for trajectory planning + prediction of object trajectories, works on test track; weak out of sample, as usual for imitation learning)
• “Measuring the Intrinsic Dimension of Objective Landscapes”, Li et al 2018 (blog/video; measuring absolute difficulties of tasks: inverted pendulum, 4; MNIST, 290; Humanoid, 700; CIFAR-10, 2990; ALE Pong, 6000.)
• “2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison”
• Ganbreeder “Featured Images” (Ganbreeder has been upgraded to 512px BigGAN, 2x upscaling using waifu2x, accounts to save images, best-of gallery; deliciously uncanny)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “What’s Wrong with Psychology Anyway?”, Lykken 1991
• “Notes on a New Philosophy of Empirical Science”, Burfoot 2011 (the ‘compression as inference’ paradigm of intelligence for application to science; stupid gzip tricks, Cilibrasi 2006; stupid zpaq tricks with paqclass)
• “The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use”, Orben & Przybylski 2019 (SCA: brute-forcing the ‘garden of forking paths’ to examine robustness of results—the poor man’s Bayesian model comparison)
• “ActiveRemediation: The Search for Lead Pipes in Flint, Michigan”, Abernethy et al 2018 (optimal search problem; efficient approach abandoned due to local politics)

Politics/religion:

• “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”, Tom Wolfe 1970
• “Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change during the Age of Mass Migration”, Knudsen 2019 (potentially genetic)
• “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”, Donella Meadows 1999 (systems analysis)
• “The Economics of the Baby Shortage”, Landes & Posner 1978

Psychology/biology:

• “Doing Despite Disliking: Self-regulatory Strategies in Everyday Aversive Activities”, Hennecke et al 2018
• “No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime”
• The boy who convinced his friend to murder him via false online identities
• “Self-management of Fatal Familial Insomnia. Part 2: Case Report”, Schenkein & Montagna 2006 (a remarkable case-study of one man’s efforts to control his sleep & stave off death, allowing him to report interesting hallucinations from the end-stage; background: “One Couple’s Tireless Crusade to Stop a Genetic Killer: When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease, she and her husband, Eric Minikel, set out to find a cure”)
• Pornhub Insights 2018: year in review
• “How Do People Communicate Before Death? Insights into the little-studied realm of last words” (who by slow decay…)
• “Marijuana intoxication in a cat”, Janeczek et al 2018
• The Asian giant hornet (anti-hornet defense mechanisms are interesting)

Technology:

• “Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory”, Pavlogiannis et al 2018 (creating subpopulations with topologies designed for much more efficient natural selection—implications for evolutionary RL or online ‘plazas and warrens’-style community design?)
• “TV or not TV? The Impact of Subtitling on English Skills”, Micola et al 2018 (every Scandinavian I’ve asked agrees that subtitling helped them learn English; it’s also interesting that one’s comfort seems to depend on growing up with it—my normal-hearing siblings grew up with subtitles because of me, and now say they prefer subtitles)
• Advice: “Photograph Your Work” (HN)

Economics:

• “The Price of Nails since 1700: Even Simple Products Experienced Large Price Declines”, Sichel 2017
• Unusual occupations in France

Philosophy:

• “Possible Girls”, Sinhababu 2008 (on modal realism)
• “The tale of Phyllis and Aristotle”

Fiction:

• “Giant Killer”, A. Bertram Chandler (Astounding, 1946; a cross between Shin Sekai Yori/Watership Down)

Misc:

• David Walsh’s MONA museum: “a secular temple and a subversive adult Disneyland”
• “Total Eclipse”, Dillard 1982

Books

Nonfiction:

• Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom, James 2011 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• The Dark Knight Rises (2012; bombastic & unconvincing sequel. The only thing more boring than the poorly-reheated French Revolution shtick are the fights between Bane & Batman and the unconvincing twist at the end.)

Animated:

• The Thief and the Cobbler (One of the most gorgeous hand-animated films of all time, featuring striking sequences playing with geometry & color , or what would have been, had it not been undermined by development hell & perfectionism. I used the ‘recobbled’ edit version 4 which I got somewhere years ago (perhaps the Internet Archive?). The quality is not good—the image resolution is barely DVD-grade, there is noise, the recobbled edits splice in animatics where the film was not finished, or even just storyboard sketches, and there are nasty yellow hardcoded Spanish subtitles for some reason. I probably could’ve done better. The experience of watching is intended to be comedic but is inevitably also a melancholy one. Unlike Redline, where the development hell finally yielded a finished polished product, every few minutes of The Thief and the Cobbler bears ‘the indelible stamp of its lowly origins’ as a rushed hackjob of in-progress materials and not a completed vision. The story jumps abruptly, luxuriating in gorgeous but inconsequentially long sequences—like a lengthy polo match in which the Thief is ever more improbably abused by the heedless players & steeds—while key scenes like the cobbler & princess falling in love are sometimes not even animated. The Thief influenced animators who worked on or saw it in samizdat (just consider the existence of Aladdin), but it was ultimately released decades after its moment had passed, and in sorry shape; animation had moved on, and what would have been stunning sequences in the 1970s or 1980s with backbreaking hand-drawn 3D movements now look almost ordinary in the CGI era. Considering the length of the film and how much was apparently cut & unable to be added back into the Recobbled edits, it seems likely to me that the core problem with The Thief and the Cobbler is not a lack of budget for animation, but a lack of the right animation—that is, in an example of “real artists ship”, much of the effort was misguided, priorities were not set, resources were squandered chasing peoples’ beautiful fancies instead of working on what the film actually needed (despite funding thanks to success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and like Evangelion, scheduling was not done right. Blame for this must ultimately be laid at Williams’s door. As the Thackeray line goes, “to think on him is to think on the ruin of a great empire.”)

Music

Touhou:

• “いつかの空の下で” (VALLEYSTONE feat. 空音; デジウィ NEXT {R15}) [electronic]

MLP:

• “Going Far” (Jyc Row & PegasYs feat. Michelle Creber; Jyc Row Orchestral Compilation Vol. 3—SOLAR {2018}) [rock]
• “Sunshine and Celery Stalks” (PinkiePieSwear; PPS 2011 {2011}) [electronic]
• “Embraced By The Fields of The Lagalume” (Lectoblix; The Night Shall Last Forever {2015}) [ambient]
• “A Pale Lit Sanctuary” (Lectoblix; The Night Shall Last Forever {2015}) [metal]