January 2021 gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO
2020-01-02–2021-01-16
in progress
certainty: log
importance: 0
January 2021’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, 2020 (archives). This is a summary of the revision-history RSS feed, overlapping with my Changelog & /
Writings
Links
AI
- “2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison”, Larks
- “Grounded Language Learning Fast and Slow”, Hill et al 2020
- “DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention”, He et al 2020 (SuperGLUE falls)
- “Solving Mixed Integer Programs Using Neural Networks”, Nair et al 2020
- “Towards Fully Automated Manga Translation”, Hinami et al 2020
- Scaling up: “DALL·E: Creating Images from Text”, OpenAI (GPT-3-12.5b generating 1280 tokens → VQVAE pixels; generates illustration & photos); “CLIP: Connecting Text and Images”, OpenAI (zero-shot image understanding via text description - useful for much more than just ranking DALL-E samples by quality)
- Scaling down: “DeiT: Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention”, Touvron et al 2020 (scaling Transformer classifiers down to ImageNet+1-GPU); “VQGAN: Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis”, Esser et al 2020 (training >1024px Transformer GANs on just 2 GPUs)
- “Transformers in Vision: A Survey”, Khan et al 2021
Genetics
Everything Is Heritable:
- “Nurture might be nature: cautionary tales and proposed solutions”, Hart et al 2021
- “A genetic perspective on the association between exercise and mental health in the era of genome-wide association studies”, de Geus 2020
- “Antidepressant Response in Major Depressive Disorder: A Genome-wide Association Study”, Pain et al 2020
- “Genome wide analysis of gene dosage in 24,092 individuals shows that 10,000 genes modulate cognitive ability”, Huguet et al 2020 (still polygenic)
Recent Evolution:
- “African genetic diversity and adaptation inform a precision medicine agenda”, Pereira et al 2021
- “Genome scans of dog behavior implicate a gene network underlying psychopathology in mammals, including humans”, Zapata et al 2021
Engineering:
Statistics/Meta-Science/Math
- “How accurate are citations of frequently cited papers in biomedical literature?”, Pavlovic et al 2020 (includes original author’s evaluation of whether a citation of their work is correct)
- “Energy-Efficient Algorithms”, Demaine et al 2016 (reversible computing asymptotics: constant-factor stacks/
arrays, 𝒪(log n) time/ energy AVL trees, 𝒪(n) space sorts, & various 𝒪(Vertex+Edge) time/ space/ energy graph searches)
Politics/Religion
- “The Mechanisms of Cult Production: An Overview”, Xavier Marquez 2020 (see previously his blog roundup)
- “When Prophecy Fails and Faith Persists: A Theoretical Overview”, Dawson 1999
- “Why We Fight Over Fiction”, Robin Hanson
- The All-Woman Supreme Court
Psychology/Biology
- “A unified framework for association and prediction from vertex‐wise grey-matter structure”, Couvy-Duchesne et al 2020 (more morphometricity)
- Common phenomena: “Sounds from seeing silent motion: Who hears them, and what looks loudest?”, Fassnidge & Freeman 2018 (on ‘visual ear’; previously: Saenz & Koch 2008, Fassnidge et al 2017)
- “No evidence for general intelligence in a fish”, Aellen et al 2021
- Delirum tremens
- Parker-Hulme murder case; The Slender Man stabbing (paracosms?)
- Correction: Programming competition skills do not inversely correlate with job performance after all
Technology
- “The Aesthetic-Usability Effect”, Moran 2017 (“They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken” if it’s pretty enough; see also “The Third User”)
- “Cameras and Lenses”, Bartosz Ciechanowski (explorable; followup to “Lights and Shadows”)
- “Ditherpunk—The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering”
- Natural nuclear fission reactors (Oklo)
- The Corrupted Blood incident
- “Hangulatin”: a Hangul-inspired font for English/
German word blocks - Footnote 36: “Redisturbed”: a unicase font experiment
Economics
- "Does Advertising Actually Work?" (what could be more obvious than “advertising works”, and trivial to confirm with correlational data? Yet, the tedious saying “correlation ≠ causation” stubbornly insists on being true); “Digital Paywall Design: Implications for Content Demand and Subscriptions”, Aral & Dhillon 2020 (NYT nag-paywall caused −9.9% reading; in line with all the other results)
Philosophy
Fiction
- “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!”, William Tenn 2016
- “St Martin’s Four Wishes”, Anonymous medieval poet (trans. Dubin 2013)
Miscellaneous
- “Caesar Lives”, Iggy Pop 1995
- Ferdinandea
Books
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
Film/TV
Live-action:
Animated:
Music
MLP:
Doujin:
Misc: