Links

Ge­net­ics:

• Every­thing Is Her­i­ta­ble:

  • “Large-s­cale GWAS re­veals in­sights into the ge­netic ar­chi­tec­ture of same-sex sex­ual be­hav­ior”, Ganna et al 2019 (as ex­pect­ed, ex­cept for the ge­netic het­ero­gene­ity be­tween ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity & bi­sex­u­al­i­ty?)

• Re­cent Evo­lu­tion:

  • “Ge­nomic Ev­i­dence for Lo­cal Adap­ta­tion of Hunter-Gath­er­ers to the African Rain­for­est”, Lopez et al 2019

• En­gi­neer­ing:

  • 5 Russ­ian cou­ples who are deaf want to try CRISPR so they can have a hear­ing child by fix­ing GJB2 gene mu­ta­tions

AI:

• “Re­ward Tam­per­ing Prob­lems and So­lu­tions in Re­in­force­ment Learn­ing: A Causal In­flu­ence Di­a­gram Per­spec­tive”, Everitt & Hut­ter 2019 (blog: “De­sign­ing agent in­cen­tives to avoid re­ward tam­per­ing”; LW)

• “Has dy­namic pro­gram­ming im­proved de­ci­sion mak­ing?”, Rust 2018 (some case-s­tud­ies)

• Mat­ters Of Scale:

  • LM news: Mega­tronLM, Nvidia (train­ing a GPT-2-8.3B (!), which over­fits on their dataset); “GPT-2: 6-Month Fol­low-Up”, Ope­nAI (re­lease of GPT-2-774M); “OpenGPT-2: We Repli­cated GPT-2 Be­cause You Can Too”, Gokaslan & Co­hen 2019 (pub­lic re­lease of an in­de­pen­dent­ly-trained GPT-2-1.5b mod­el)

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• “We Need a New Sci­ence of Pro­gress: Hu­man­ity needs to get bet­ter at know­ing how to get bet­ter”, Patrick Col­li­son & Tyler Cowen
• “Is the FDA Too Con­ser­v­a­tive or Too Ag­gres­sive?: A Bayesian De­ci­sion Analy­sis of Clin­i­cal Trial De­sign”, Isakov et al 2019
• “Scott and Scurvy”
• The Gam­bler’s Fal­lacy in ac­tion at the Monte Carlo Casi­no, 1893-08-18

Politics/religion:

• “How Gullible are We? A Re­view of the Ev­i­dence from Psy­chol­ogy and So­cial Sci­ence”, Mercier 2017
• “Mass Shoot­ings: De­fi­n­i­tions and Trends”, RAND 2018 (what do sta­tis­tics like “there were 371 mass shoot­ings in 2015” ac­tu­ally mean?)
• “Dy­ing the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence way: the hor­ror of my fa­ther’s last days; The an­ti-med­ical dogma of Chris­t­ian Sci­ence led my fa­ther to an ag­o­nis­ing death. Now the church it­self is in de­cline—and it can’t hap­pen fast enough”
• “Why Don’t Col­leges Get Rid of Their Bad Fra­ter­ni­ties? A year­long in­ves­ti­ga­tion of Greek houses re­veals their en­demic, lurid, and some­times tragic prob­lem­s—and a so­phis­ti­cated sys­tem for shift­ing the blame”
• “Why Men Love War”, Broyles 1984
• Re­view: From Third World to First: The Sin­ga­pore Sto­ry—1965–2000, by Lee Kuan Yew: part 1/, 2: “You are free to agree”, 3: “Race, lan­guage, and un­com­fort­able ques­tions”, 4: “The path­way to power”
• “Pe­ter Thiel’s Re­li­gion”, David Perell (highly spec­u­la­tive but in­ter­est­ing)

Psychology/biology:

• “De­bunk­ing the Stan­ford Prison Ex­per­i­ment”, Le Tex­ier 2019
• “A Silent Child­hood”, Rymer 1992 (on the Ge­nie child abuse case & ori­gin of lan­guage; Ge­nie’s cog­ni­tive pro­file—strong non­ver­bal skills, weak verbal/social—reminds me of chim­panzee vs chil­dren)
• “What the voice in­side your head says about you: We tend to as­sume that our in­ter­nal mono­logue ‘speaks’ in word­s—but it turns out that, for many of us, it’s much more com­pli­cated” (see also “To­ward a phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of in­ner speak­ing”, Hurl­burt et al 2013; “The va­ri­eties of in­ner speech: Links be­tween qual­ity of in­ner speech and psy­chopatho­log­i­cal vari­ables in a sam­ple of young adults”, Mc­Carthy-Jones & Fer­ny­hough 2011)
• Struc­tured Pro­cras­ti­na­tion
• “The Gen­er­a­tive Ad­ver­sar­ial Brain”, Ger­sh­man 2019 (on the ori­gins of psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders)
• “Log­a­rith­mic Scales of Plea­sure and Pain: Rat­ing, Rank­ing, and Com­par­ing Peak Ex­pe­ri­ences Sug­gest the Ex­is­tence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffer­ing”, Qualia Com­put­ing
• “The Dev­il’s Bait: Symp­toms, signs, and the rid­dle of Morgel­lons”; “Maybe It’s Ly­me: What hap­pens when ill­ness be­comes an iden­ti­ty?”
• “De­vel­op­men­tal an­tecedents of achieved em­i­nence”, Si­mon­ton 1987
• “The Effi­cacy of Modafinil as a Cog­ni­tive En­hancer: A Sys­tem­atic Re­view and Meta-Analy­sis”, Kred­low et al 2019
• “Fea­tures of a suc­cess­ful ther­a­peu­tic fast of 382 days’ du­ra­tion”, Stew­art & Flem­ing 1973

Tech­nol­o­gy:

• “Atchafalaya”, John McPhee 1987 (on the Old River Con­trol Struc­ture & ul­ti­mately doomed at­tempt to keep the Mis­sis­sippi River in place)
• “Why did we wait so long for the bi­cy­cle?”
• “Hal­l’s Law: The Nine­teenth Cen­tury Pre­quel to Moore’s Law”
• “Hard Drive of Hear­ing: Disks that Eaves­drop with a Syn­the­sized Mi­cro­phone”, Kwong et al 2019
• “The Road to Clar­ity” (on the cre­ation of the since-con­tro­ver­sial Clearview high­way font)

Eco­nom­ics:

• “The Launch: In­side the ‘largest launch of a pro­duce item in Amer­i­can his­tory’” (more on ap­ple breed­ing & sell­ing: the Cos­mic Crisp ap­ple)
• “Bayesian Per­sua­sion and In­for­ma­tion De­sign”, Ka­menica 2019
• “Can You In­dem­nify Against Dick Pics? The rise of scan­dal in­sur­ance in Hol­ly­wood”

Phi­los­o­phy:

• “Con­sider the Lob­ster: For 56 years, the Maine Lob­ster Fes­ti­val has been draw­ing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One vis­i­tor would ar­gue that the cel­e­bra­tion in­volves a whole lot more”, David Fos­ter Wal­lace 2004

Fic­tion:

• “A sci­ence fic­tion writer of the Fifties”, Brad Lei­thauser 2006
• “How a Lit­er­ary Prank Con­vinced Ger­many That ‘Hansel and Gre­tel’ Was Re­al: A 1963 book pur­ported to prove that the sib­lings were mur­der­ous bak­ers”

Misc:

• “An In­side Look at the Sur­pris­ingly Vi­o­lent Quid­ditch World Cup”

Books

Fic­tion:

• Curves and An­gles, Brad Lei­thauser (re­view)

Film/TV

Live-ac­tion:

• Gone with the Wind (1939; re­view)
• Shin Godzilla (2016; re­view)