Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Comparing within- and between-family polygenic score prediction”, Selzam et al 2019 (within-family PGSes confirm causality; deflation in line with previous estimates & SES moderation consistence with much of it being “nature of nurture” genetic effects)

  • “Polygenic Prediction of Weight and Obesity Trajectories from Birth to Adulthood”, Khera et al 2019 (8.4% of variance; further confirmation that obesity is in part a neurological trait—“If people don’t want to come to the ballpark how are you going to stop them?”)

  • “Familial influences on Neuroticism and Education in the UK Biobank”, Cheesman et al 2019 (another GREML-KIN/family-GCTA)

  • “GWAS of brain volume on 54,407 individuals and cross-trait analysis with intelligence identifies shared genomic loci and genes”, Jansen et al 2019

  • “The Intergenerational Effects Of A Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After The Civil War”, Ager et al 2019

AI:

• OpenAI’s OA5 defeats the TI 2018 champions at DoTA2, 2-0; 8-0 in total pro matches; global Arena results (commentary; building AGI by scaling up convnets and LSTMs seems increasingly like trying to go to the moon by building ever-larger bottle rockets.)

• “Speech synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences”, Anumanchipalli et al 2019

• MuseNet: large Sparse Transformers for MIDI music generation (Child et al 2019; stream of random samples; HN)

• “Inferring Human Traits From Facebook Statuses”, Cutler & Kulis2018 (“everything is correlated”: personality, IQ, religion, politics etc)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “How Replicable Are Links Between Personality Traits and Consequential Life Outcomes? The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project”, Soto2019 (individual-differences research continues to replicate well)

Politics/religion:

• the Italian “Podestà” system (alternate governments)

• “Using GPT-2 to ‘Sort by Controversial’”; “Simulated Culture War Roundup Thread Using GPT-2”

Psychology/biology:

• “Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem”, Vrselja et al 2019 (Media: 1, 2, 3; reviving cells of a pig brain from a slaughterhouse hours later)

• “Enjoy It Again: Repeat Experiences Are Less Repetitive Than People Think”, O’Brien2019 (should we rewatch/reread much more than we do?)

• “A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota”, DePalma et al 2018 (media: New Yorker/Science/Smithsonian/NYT/National Geographic/Economist/Wikipedia)

• “Does incubation enhance problem-solving? A meta-analytic review”, Sio & Ormerod2009

• “A New Germ Theory: The dictates of evolution virtually demand that the causes of some of humanity’s chronic & most baffling ‘noninfectious’ illnesses will turn out to be pathogens”, 1999 (20 years on, the jury is still out)

• “Variations on the Hermann grid: an extinction illusion”, Ninio & Stevens2000 (how many dots can you see?)

• Chicken hypnotism (cf. /r/CucumbersScaringCats)

• Will Stephen’s TED talk about nothing (the kinesics of intelligentsia)

Technology:

• ArchiveBox: a user-friendly tool for making robust WWW archives (self-contained HTMLs, PDFs, PNG screenshots, & wget snapshots)

• “Was Moore’s Law Inevitable?”, Kevin Kelly

• DNM updates: Operation Bayonet: How Dutch Police took over the Hansa Darknet Market & Used It as a Honeypot; SR2’s Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2) was Thomas White (‘Cthulhu’), caught in 2014 in UK, & just sentenced to 5 years

• “Morrowind: An oral history—‘Here’s a world. Go play it how you wanna play it’”

• SIGBOVIK 2019:

  • “Survival in chessland”, Murphy VII 2019

  • “Optimizing The Sacrifice”, Zevallos2019

  • “Turing-Complete [3D] Chess Computation”, Dempsey et al 2019

  • “LATEL: a Logical And Transparent Experimental Language”, Liu-Huang2019

  • “On Double-Sided QR-Codes”, Tikhonov2019

  • “93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs”, McMillen & Toady2019

  • “All You Need Is Dogball”, Arulkumaran et al 2019

• “The Strongest Man in the World: A new era of strength competitions tests the limits of the human body”

• “Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete”, Churchill et al 2019 (the TM is now fully-automated/forced-actions-only, removing the asterisk on its weird machine)

• “Harnessing vision for computation”, Changizi2008 (“Example ‘visual circuit’ using visual stimuli and illusions to trick your brain into carrying out arbitrary computations.”?)

Economics:

• “Beware the pitfalls of short-term program effects: They often fade”

• “The Long Tail: Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream”, Anderson2004 (15 years on: both right & wrong—the reality is stranger, as we got both increased superstardom and the long tail in spades)

Fiction: