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 & Hutter2019 (blog: “Designing agent incentives to avoid reward tampering”; LW)

• “Has dynamic programming improved decision making?”, Rust2018 (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 & Cohen2019 (public release of an independently-trained GPT-2-1.5b model)

Statistics/Meta-Science:

• “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”, Mercier2017

• “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”, Broyles1984

• 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 Texier2019

• “A Silent Childhood”, Rymer1992 (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 & Fernyhough2011)

• Structured Procrastination

• “The Generative Adversarial Brain”, Gershman2019 (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”, Simonton1987

• “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 & Fleming1973

Technology:

• “Atchafalaya”, John McPhee1987 (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; finally became available in my area in late 2020—I thought they were decent enough, pretty, but too sweet and uncompetitively priced compared to Honeycrisp/SweeTango)

• “Bayesian Persuasion and Information Design”, Kamenica2019

• “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)