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

Mat­ters Of Scale:

• 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