February 2019 Gwern.net newsletter with 2 essays/projects, site improvements; links on genetics, AI, propaganda, and typography; and 1 opera review.
This is the February 2019 edition of the Gwern.net newsletter; previous, January 2019 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.
Writings
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“This Waifu Does Not Exist (TWDNE)” (background & implementation; how to train your own StyleGAN)
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Gwern.net CSS/HTML/JS changes: click-to-zoom images (using
image-focus.js); headers are now self-links; Tufte CSS-style epigraph support; Table of Contents: Wikipedia-style section numbering, margin & size tweaks, lightweight subset of Source Sans Pro (for Mac users); nicer diamond list icons; sleeker sidebar (especially nice on mobile); PDF/internal/section links are now annotated with icons; borders on tables, image figures, and blockquotes; old-style numerals in text & tabular numerals in tables; justified text (but not in Chrome due to decade-old lack of hyphenation); narrowed maximum body-width in characters & made line-height responsive to body-width (hopefully addresses the perennial complaints that pages are always too wide/too narrow/lines too close); quote highlighting disabled by default; collapsible code-blocks; inline smallcaps support; optimized SVG logo & favicon; page-specific CSS overrides enabled; list paragraph bugs in Pandoc fixed; compressed JPEGs; changed code syntax-highlighting scheme to match overall esthetics better; miscellaneous responsive design/mobile improvements
Media
Links
Genetics:
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Everything Is Heritable:
- “Genetics and Crime: Integrating New Genomic Discoveries Into Psychological Research About Antisocial Behavior”, Wertz et al 2018 (IQ/EDU PGS predicts juvenile delinquency & crime; previously: Rautiainen et al 2016/Tielbeek et al 2017/Tielbeek et al 2018)1
- “Predicting educational achievement from genomic measures and socioeconomic status”, von Stumm et al 2019
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Recent Evolution:
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Engineering:
- “The Death of a Dreamer—Austen Heinz and Cambrian Genomics” (what happened to an early genome synthesis pioneer)
- “The DIY designer baby project funded with Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency, biohacking, and the fantastic plan for transgenic humans” (Bryan Bishop’s startup for genetic editing of human embryos/sperm)
AI:
- “Better Language Models and Their Implications”, OpenAI (GPT-2, a 10× larger Transformer model than before w/unsupervised learning on 40GB text leads to large gains on natural language generation & high performance on untrained NLP tasks: “Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners”, Radford et al 2019. Worth pondering: GPT-2 costs only ~$43k raw compute and is not even fully trained (pg4); OA could afford to scale it 100×, which is still cheaper than their OA5 project. If GPT-2 is this good now, what does it look like scaled further, with improvements like limited recurrency?)
- “Real-time Continuous Transcription with Live Transcribe”/“Making audio more accessible with two new apps” (NN-powered Android app for live speech-to-text transcription, piloted at Gallaudet University for the deaf; great news for the hard-of-hearing too)
- StyleGAN source code & models released (I immediately applied it to create TWDNE)
- Entendrepreneur: a “Portmanteau & Rhyme Generator” using word embeddings, Simon 2018 (SSC, HN; examples: “cat+rationality = mewtilitarian”; “computer+animation = miyazakistroke”; “the mapping of cats”: “geografeline”; see also “Alpha”)
- ProGAN generation of 128px anime faces, results (~3 weeks training on Danbooru2017)
Statistics/Meta-Science:
- “Most Rigorous Large-Scale Educational RCTs are Uninformative: Should We Be Concerned?”, Lortie-Forgues & Inglis 2019 (the metallic laws strike again)
- “Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, And Views Among Ethics Committees And Prominent Scientists”, Hanley et al 2018
Politics/religion:
- “The Real War 1939–1945”, Paul Fussell 1989 (“…he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings…too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans”)
- “Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet”, Dobelli 2010
- “Land lotteries, long-term wealth, and political selection”, Poulos 2019
- “Nggwal, who travels in structures of fiber and bone atop rivers of blood.”
- Suppression of the Society of Jesus
- “Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France”, Johnson & Koyama 2014
- Best Of Abandoned Footnotes
Psychology/biology:
- “Deep Intellect”: the mind of an octopus
- MEMORIZE (a randomized spaced-repetition review algorithm derived using principles from control theory)
- “A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions” (psychiatric case study)
- “Congregations Of Tear-Drinking Bees At Human Eyes: Foraging Strategies For An Invaluable Resource By Lisotrigona In Thailand (Apidae, Meliponini)”, Bänziger 2018
Technology:
- “What Color are your bits?”
- “Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s” (pre-greenhouse tech: thick southern-facing walls for passive heating)
- “Crinkler secrets: 4k-intro executable compression at its best”
- Typography in Alien
- Typography in Blade Runner
- “Scanning a Braille Playboy issue”, Jason Scott
Economics:
- “The true story of Russia’s weakness [stifled by bad planning, bureaucratic inefficiency, and lack of any real incentive]”, Nutter 1957 (prescient)
- “The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture—Part One”/Part Two/Part Three/Part Four/Part Five
- “You Say You Want a Devolution? For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new”
- “The Borderlands Gun Collector’s Club”, Steve Yegge 2012 (emergent token economies in video games)
Philosophy:
- “The Force That Drives the Flower”, Dillard 1973 (existential horror)
Fiction:
- “A Colder War”, Charles Stross 2000
- “The Proverbial Murder Mystery”, SSC, SSC (see also “The Study of Anglophysics”)
- “The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld”
Misc:
- Olbers’ paradox
- The terribly tragic life of the terrible painter Benjamin Haydon
- “The Gravity Research Foundation” (dedicated to the war on gravity)
Books
Nonfiction:
- Practical Typography, Matthew Butterick 2013 (a useful if idiosyncratic introduction to typography with a word processor/HTML focus; reading through this was helpful in understanding possible CSS/design improvements while improving Gwern.net this month)
Film/TV
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Further reading from “Genomics of human aggression: current state of genome-wide studies and an automated systematic review tool”, Odintsova et al 2019:
Reviewed papers from Table 2:
- Baud 2005, “Personality traits as intermediary phenotypes in suicidal behavior: genetic issues”
- Moffitt 2005, “Genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behaviors: evidence from behavioral–genetic research”
- Craig & Halton 2009, “Genetics of human aggressive behaviour”
- Tuvblad & Baker 2012, “Human aggression across the lifespan: Genetic propensities and environmental moderators”
- Anholt & McKay 2012, “Genetics of aggression”
- Vassos et al 2014, “Systematic meta-analyses and field synopsis of genetic association studies of violence and aggression”
- Provencal et al 2015, “The developmental origins of chronic physical aggression: biological pathways triggered by early life adversity”
- Tielbeek et al 2012, “Unraveling the genetic etiology of adult antisocial behavior: a genome-wide association study”
- McGue et al 2013, “A genome-wide association study of behavioral disinhibition”
- Tiihonen et al 2015, “Genetic background of extreme violent behavior”
- Mick et al 2014, “Genome-wide association study of proneness to anger”
- Salvatore et al 2015, “Genome-wide association data suggest ABCB1 and immune-related gene sets may be involved in adult antisocial behavior”
- Zhang-James et al 2016, “Genetic architecture for human aggression: A study of gene–phenotype relationship in OMIM”
- Fernàndez-Castillo et al 2016, “Aggressive Behavior in Humans: Genes and Pathways Identified Through Association Studies”
- Veroude et al 2016, “Genetics of aggressive behavior: An overview”
- Waltes et al 2016, “The neurobiological basis of human aggression: a review on genetic and epigenetic mechanisms”
- Manchia & Fanos 2017, “Targeting aggression in severe mental illness: The predictive role of genetic, epigenetic, and metabolomic markers”
- Beaver et al 2018, “On the Genetic and Genomic Basis of Aggression, Violence, and Antisocial Behavior”
- Tremblay et al 2019, “Developmental origins of chronic physical aggression: A bio-psycho-social model for the next generation of preventive interventions”
- Davydova et al 2018, “Recent advances in genetics of aggressive behavior” (Russian)
- Gard et al 2019, “Genetic influences on antisocial behavior: Recent advances and future directions”
- Salvatore & Dick 2018, “Genetic influences on conduct disorder”
Other papers from Table 3:
- Sonunga-Barke et al 2008, “Does parental expressed emotion moderate genetic effects in ADHD? An exploration using a genome wide association scan”
- Anney et al 2008, “Conduct disorder and ADHD: evaluation of conduct problems as a categorical and quantitative trait in the international multicentre ADHD genetics study”
- Viding et al 2010, “In search of genes associated with risk for psychopathic tendencies in children: a two-stage genome-wide association study of pooled DNA”
- Dick et al 2010, “Genome-wide association study of conduct disorder symptomatology”
- Perjonen et al 2011, “Hostility in adolescents and adults: a genome-wide association study of the Young Finns”
- Mick et al 2011, “Genome-wide association study of the child behavior checklist dysregulation profile”
- Pappa et al 2016, “A genome-wide approach to children’s aggressive behavior: The EAGLE consortium”
See also:
- Barnes et al 2019, “The propensity for aggressive behavior and lifetime incarceration risk: A test for gene-environment interaction (G×E) using whole-genome data”