Links

Genetics:

• everything is heritable:

  • “The Chinese National Twin Registry: a ‘gold mine’ for scientific research”, Gao et al 2019 (includes 88 MZA)
  • “Genetics of Intellectual and Personality Traits Associated with Creative Genius: Could Geniuses Be Cosmobian Dragon Kings?”, Johnson & Bouchard 2014 (cf. Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity; Lykken et al 1992, “Emergenesis: Genetic Traits That May Not Run in Families”; Lykken 2006, “The mechanism of emergenesis”; Lykken 1982, “Research With Twins: The Concept of Emergenesis”)
  • “Inequality in genetic cancer risk suggests bad genes rather than bad luck”, Stensrud & Valberg 2017 (previously)

• recent evolution:

  • “Genetic contributions to variation in human stature in prehistoric Europe”, Cox et al 2019 (phenotyping the graveyard)
  • “How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited—With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren”, Woodley et al 2019

• engineering:

  • “Thinking About the Evolution of Complex Traits in the Era of Genome-Wide Association Studies”, Sella & Barton 2019 (review on additive complex traits: architecture, evolution, & selection)
  • “The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies: New ‘living drugs’—made from a patient’s own cells—can cure once incurable cancers. But can we afford them?” (on the history of CAR-T therapy)

AI:

• Pluribus: “Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker”, Brown & Sandholm 2019 (Monte Carlo CFR “stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker”; commentary)
• “How we built the Waifu Vending Machine” (HN; Sizigi Studios has launched a new online interactive GAN waifu generator, based in part on Danbooru2018; see also my StyleGAN/TWDNE writeups)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “The Big Crunch”, David Goodstein 1994; “1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled”, Scott Alexander (on the end to post-WWII Vannevar Bushian exponential growth of academia & consequences thereof: growth can’t go on forever, and it didn’t. What we see now, a quarter of a century later, is the grim equilibrium.)
• “Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams”, Stefan Torges
• “Inhaling the spore: Field trip to a museum of natural (un)history”, Weschler 1994 (on the LA Museum of Jurassic Technology)
• “Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact”, Sinatra et al 2016 (no life-cycle effects on most-cited papers)
• “Super-centenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans”, Newman 2019 (“a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records”)

Politics/religion:

• T. Greer’s “The Scholar’s Stage” (Greer’s selection):

  • “Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution”

  • “Vengeance As Justice: Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Eye for an Eye”

  • “Tradition is Smarter Than You Are”

  • “When Modern War Met an Antique Art”

  • “Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, part 1”, part 2; “ISIS, the Mongols, and ‘The Return of Ancient Challenges’”

  • “The Cross Section Illusion”

  • Ancient Greece:

    • The Thucydides Roundtable:

      • “Everybody Wants a Thucydides Trap”
      • “Men of Honor, Men of Interest”
      • “History is Written by the Losers”

    • “Pre-Modern Battlefields Were Absolutely Terrifying”

  • China:

    • “The Radical Sun Tzu”
    • “What Edward Luttwak Doesn’t Know About Ancient China (Or a Short History of Han-Xiongnu Relations), part 1”, part 2
    • “Smallpox on the Steppe”
    • “Meditations on Maoism—Ye Fu’s Hard Road Home”
    • “Reflections on China’s Stalinist Heritage I: A Tyrant’s Toolkit”, “II: Just How Totalitarian is Modern China?”; “Everything is Worse in China”
    • “The Utterly Dysfunctional Belt and Road”
    • “The Inner Life of Chinese Teenagers”

  • America:

    • “Ominous Parallels: What Antebellum America Can Teach Us About Our Modern Political Regime”; “Shakespeare in American Politics”
    • “Awareness vs. Action: Two Modes of Protest in American History”
    • “Passages I Highlighted in My Copy of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”
    • “Questing for Transcendence” (cf MLP, Broyles 1984)
    • “America Will Always Fail At Regional Expertise”; “American Policy Makers Do Not Read Books”; “You Do Not Have the People”; “What Cyber-War Will Look Like”

Psychology/biology:

• “Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?” ("“What’s happened, I’d argue,” says Christof Koch, the president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, “is that a lot of things about the brain that we once thought were irreversible have turned out not necessarily to be so.”"; cf. cryonics)
• “Widespread associations between grey matter structure and the human phenome”, Couvy-Duchesne et al 2019 (nice use of ‘morphometricity’/variance components to quantify total gray matter contribution to traits: Figure 1)
• “On Bloom’s two sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction”
• “The influence of familial factors on the association between IQ and educational and occupational achievement: A sibling approach”, Hegelund et al 2019 (supplement)
• “Cognitive Consequences Of Iodine Deficiency In Adolescence: Evidence From Salt Iodization In Denmark”, Serena 2019 (when the Danish government legalized iodized salt: d=0.06 on GPA)

Technology:

• “Mother Earth Mother Board”, Neal Stephenson 1996 (“A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning ‘hacker tourist’ account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth”)
• “High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace”

Economics:

• “Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics”, van de Rijt et al 2014 (small ‘Matthew effects’ in popularity dynamics on Kickstarter/WP/Change.org/Epinions: randomness, not manipulability)

Philosophy:

• “Inverse Law of Scientific Nomenclature”, Scott Alexander (on the Nuwaubian Nation cult’s language delusion; see also sovereign citizen movement)

Misc:

• “The King of the Ferret Leggers: What kind of person sticks a ferret down his pants for more than five consecutive hours? Our writer tried to find out”

Books

Nonfiction:

• Robert Bakewell and the Longhorn Breed of Cattle, Stanley 1995 (review)

Film/TV

Live-action:

• Free Solo (2018)

  Free Solo is a documentary on Alex Honnold, a rock climber who specializes in the most fatal kind of climbing, without any safety gear whatsoever. If you fall, you die. A film crew follows him over 2 years as he travels in his van, living a monastic life (he is even vegetarian) as he seeks to set a record by climbing the most dangerous cliff face of El Capitan. The footage, much shot by drone and able to follow Honnold from what feels like mere meters away, is literally gut-churning & breath-taking, and I felt slightly ill at points (despite not being particularly afraid of heights and enjoying the occasional gym climb).

  Free Solo is essentially much the same as the also excellent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi: an examination of monomania, excellence, and happiness. Free soloing, like cave diving or BASE jumping is extremely dangerous, and one of Honnold’s acquaintances dies during the filming—merely the latest in a long line of free solo fatalities. Inevitably, the ethics of free soloing come up. The crew and Honnold’s attractive & normal girlfriend are more concerned than he is. They, after all, will have to live with it for decades to come.

  Honnold blows the topic off; for him, it is merely a few seconds of unpleasantness and then it’s over, and if they are worried about it, then they should shove off. They can’t, of course, as they are too drawn to Honnold. His girlfriend outragedly echoes another climber’s girlfriend who was asked, “well, what did you expect?” Neither of them answers the question: well, what did you expect? You knew everything there was to know about free soloing and the fatality rate before you decided to date them. What did you expect to happen? Their response is inauthentic. In the case of Honnold’s girlfriend, she dated him solely because he was a famous climber and she went to his talk & left her phone number. She is happy to enjoy the perks like the big new house in Las Vegas or the documentary crew and, in short, the overall social prestige & high status of Honnold—even while constantly pressuring Honnold to stop doing the very thing that attracted her in the first place! The interviewer, it seems, never presses her on this contradiction.

  What of Honnold himself? Why would someone devote their life to accomplish something as utterly useless as climbing mountains without ropes again and again until they die? (It is not even a spectator sport.) Honnold comes off as clearly on the autism spectrum as ever I have seen someone, intelligent & well-intentioned but vaguely unhappy and with a remarkably flat affect. After an isolated childhood with a distant father & driving mother, nothing in his daily life seems to give him much in the way of pleasure, or indeed affect him at all (alexithymia?). Heartstopping moments like making a jump at a critical spot on El Capitan and falling off during practice, which would be fatal in the final ascent, are treated the same as frying up some kale in his van.

  A scientific interlude puts Honnold into an fMRI machine to look at fear. Climbers are already different—one of the most interviewed climbers in the documentary, Tommy Caldwell, went hiking in Kazakhstan with his girlfriend, was captured by jihadis, and escaped by pushing one off a cliff, but this is too boring to mention—yet Honnold is even more extreme, with essentially zero amygdala activation: “The photographs, even the ‘gruesome burning children and stuff’ struck him as dated and jaded.” Further, Honnold’s brain also shows near-zero activation during a gambling task offering rewards. It is striking that in the entirety of Free Solo, the only time that Honnold seems genuinely moved, genuinely smiling and happy, is when he reaches the top of El Capitan. One is left with the impression that the real reason for Honnold’s monomania is that only hours spent in the closest possible proximity to death successfully solving an intricate puzzle with a world-record as payoff can break through his gray everyday world and finally make him feel alive and feel joy. But like many drugs, tolerance builds up, and it requires more and more extreme stimuli to provide the same payoff.

  One would not want to watch a group of heroin addicts compete to see who can ‘free mainline’ the largest doses of heroin without a naloxone kit handy, as difficult & dangerous as that may indeed be; but what, in the end, is the difference between that and Honnold?

• Battle Angel Alita (2019; entertaining cyberpunk action, Alita is one of the rare adaptations that is better than its source.)

  I am shocked to be reviewing this movie, much less that it was good. Movies or video games which spend decades in development hell are known for coming out much the worse for the wear, budgets & artistic coherency ravaged by time. Battle Angel Alita was one of those jokes, like Duke Nukem Forever, yet, here it is.

  In Alita, a flying city of elites hovers over a sprawling lawless favela of poverty and cyborgs. In the dump, a local doctor discovers a still-living cyborg head, and rescues it. The revived amnesiac Alita explores her new world, falling in love, conflicting with local criminals, and, while participating in the local bloodsport (which resemble Rollerball), hones her talent for combat, the legacy of her past as an invader from a democratic Mars centuries ago, aiming to bring down the tyranny of the flying cities (a war which the Martians lost). The flying city learns of her revival and begins conspiring to kill her, succeeding only in killing her boyfriend. After overcoming her immediate enemies, Alita vows vengeance on it.

  Because of the mixed reviews I was inclined to give it a pass, but a trans acquaintance mentioned that the original cyberpunk manga was one of their favorites, and indeed, they thought it a favorite in general among trans along with, of course, The Matrix. The Matrix’s connection is easy enough to understand, as the Wachowski Brothers famously transitioned a number of years ago and are now just the Wachowskis, and the Red Pill looks exactly like a particular ’90s estrogen pill, and of course the overall gnostic theme is appropriate in a trans context, so I was curious as to what would make Alita more relevant than, say, other much-better-known cyberpunk manga/anime like Ghost in the Shell. After watching it… I can sort of see it. Alita wakes up in an unfamiliar body, not of her choosing; unlike Ghost in the Shell which infamously exploits fanservice nudity and hypersexualized robots, Alita’s body is almost boy-like, and her face looks not unlike that of an effeminate boy who has grown his hair long. She chafes at the limits of her body, worries about her boyfriend–and society—discovering what she really is, and eventually obtains a far superior one of her own choosing which better matches her self-image as a warrior & looks better too. I doubt such an interpretation was intended like The Matrix’s, but it’s understandable. In any case, the movie must stand on its own.

  As an action movie, it is entertaining. The much-debated CGI effects, particularly Alita’s face which heavily modified with CGI into a stretched anime or doll-like appearance, eventually normalize as you watch. I think it ultimately doesn’t add anything and was a bad idea, but not as bad as one would think. In any case, there is always so much to look at on the screen, with the assorted scum & villainy of the Scrapyard passing by, that one doesn’t have to watch Alita all the time. If there’s one thing you can count on a Hollywood production to do right, it’s excellent production values and loving attention to visual detail like costumes & backgrounds. Which brings us to what Hollywood usually doesn’t do right, which is the plotting. The pacing is awkward, as stuff just sorta keeps happening, and one lacks any clear sense of a plot arc or understanding of where everything is going. The plot is actually fairly well thought out, borrowing heavily from Rollerball and considerably increasing the importance of the bloodsport, but it’s confusing anyway.

  After watching it, I began reading the original manga, and I gained a new appreciation for the movie, which draws on the first 4 volumes or so. The original manga is… not that great? In many details it fails to live up to the movie. (Alita is named after a dead cat, not the doctor’s dead daughter; the new body is simply hanging around the basement, not found in a crashed spaceship; the backgrounds are nonexistent or repetitive, only so many brains-in-jars you can draw before it gets boring etc.) Many of the incidents in the movie are also in the manga, but unconnected and merely short action vignettes, and the rollerball bloodsport is merely a local sport rather than the key to revolution, and in the manga, serves largely as a extended boxing/martial-arts-style interlude, right before Alita leaves the slums and becomes a special agent of the flying city. There is a distinct lack of depth, with some pro forma ‘society made me evil’ backstories. On the other hand, the movie adaptation does a skillful job weaving it all together into a single overarching plot. Changes like Alita being named after a dead daughter or the Chiren character are just plain better.

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978; I downloaded the wrong one—who knew there were two?—but I think this one is probably better. A noir psychological thriller set in SF—of course! As the director asks, “Could it happen in the city I love the most? The city with the most advanced, progressive therapies, politics and so forth? What would happen in a place like that if the pods landed there and that element of ‘poddiness’ was spread?” Well… The pod people justify their genocide as environmentalism, incidentally. In a slow burn, the protagonists undergo one of the most effective dramatizations of a slowly-building paranoid schizophrenia & Capgras delusion; when everything explodes and it becomes more of a zombie chase movie, it’s still rescued by an appropriately downer ending.)

• Tron: Legacy (2010; a worthy followup to the original Tron: a colorful Daft Punk musical video meets Star Wars.)

• The Haunting (1963; Frame Rated wrote an interesting article on how The Haunting used cinematographic techniques to build up creepiness and a feeling of foreboding while avoiding any resort to special effects: the house—supposedly genuinely thought to be haunted—is always carefully framed to be ‘staring’ at the viewer, the director obtained a unique wide-angle lenses which subtly distorts the image (sometimes shot on infrared film!), the rooms were deliberately built to be slightly off-kilter in various ways which was exploited in the unusually long slow tracking shots whose cuts then scramble any sense of the internal layout of the house, and the actors themselves began to succumb to depression & conflict during the filming. It is all elegantly effective and a good watch at night.)

• Skyfall (2012)

Animated:

• Gosick (2011; your opinion of Gosick will depend heavily on your tolerance for tsundere lolita characters and for a mystery-of-the-week format featuring mysteries which are lame & primarily for gradual worldbuilding. The payoff is a series which gradually increases in quality over its 24 episodes, showing the growth of the two star-crossed lovers against the backdrop of an alternate-history France in which they struggle to avoid becoming pawns of an occult conspiracy to launch WWII. Stylistic quirks like the resolutely French setting & art nouveau designs, somewhat unusual in anime, and repeated use of folk tale/urban legends to structure mysteries, lend it flair, and as the pieces started to come together, I warmed up to Gosick. It is still rather melodramatic, but overall, I’d say: it’s better than it sounds.)
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988; a retread of the original MSG series, attempting a generational replay/“the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons”, but it is so aggressively in media res that even fans will be confused, and the overall structure comes off as confused and ill-written—for example, the new female Newtype Quess, who replaces the one who dies at the peak of MSG, comes off as a Mary Sue who ruins every scene she is in and yet everyone indulges her; apparently, consulting TVTropes for an explanation of why the plot is so messed up, this was supposed to reflect her Newtype powers. TVTropes further explains why the movie as a whole is so unsatisfactory, as its production is a comedy of errors: “Originally, director Yoshiyuki Tomino was going to wrap up Amuro and Char’s storyline in Gundam ZZ, but mid-way through production he was given the go-ahead to make a movie, forcing the plot of ZZ to be rewritten…In the meantime Tomino wrote the novel Hi-Streamer, but when Sunrise gave him the green light, he went back and wrote a second novel, Beltorchika’s Children, which he specifically wrote to be adapted into a movie. However, Sunrise instead chose to use Hi-Streamer, with the final film being a pretty straightforward adaptation of its second half.” Oy vey. What an ignominious end for Char & Amuro.)

Music

Misc:

• “Derezzed” (Daft Punk & Avicii; Tron: Legacy Reconfigured {2011}) [electronic]

MLP:

• “The Place Where We Belong (Faulty Remix)” (Faulty {2019}) [electronic]