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”](https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/ “A fo­rum to dis­cuss the in­ter­sec­tions of his­to­ry, be­hav­ioral sci­ence, and strate­gic thought, with an em­pha­sis on East and South­east Asian affairs.”) (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” (ex­treme naval sal­vage—a sur­pris­ing amount of com­puter mod­el­ing of the ships to de­ter­mine how to safely re­float)

Eco­nom­ics:

• “Field ex­per­i­ments of suc­cess-breed­s-suc­cess dy­nam­ics”, van de Rijt et al 2014 (only 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; re­view)
• Bat­tle An­gel Alita (2019; re­view)
• In­va­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978; re­view)
• Tron: Legacy (2010; a wor­thy fol­lowup to the orig­i­nal Tron: a col­or­ful Daft Punk mu­si­cal video meets Star Wars.)
• The Haunt­ing (1963; re­view)
• Sky­fall (2012)

An­i­mat­ed:

• Gosick (2011; re­view)
• Mo­bile Suit Gun­dam: Char’s Coun­ter­at­tack (1988; re­view)
• Evan­ge­lion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012; re­view)

Music

Misc:

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

MLP:

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