AI

• “AlphaStar Unplugged: Large-Scale Offline Reinforcement Learning”, Mathieu et al 2023

• “ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools”, Bran et al 2023 (DL autonomous design & synthesis of chemicals)

• “Artificial intelligence-supported screen reading versus standard double reading in the Mammography Screening with Artificial Intelligence trial (MASAI): a clinical safety analysis of a randomized, controlled, non-inferiority, single-blinded, screening accuracy study”, Lång et al 2023

• “Diversifying AI: Towards Creative Chess with AlphaZero”, Zahavy et al 2023 (novelty search by conditioning on an ID variable)

Matters Of Scale:

• Profile of Morris Chang and the creation of TSMC (“We control all the choke points. China can’t really do anything if we want to choke them.”)

• “Not what you’ve signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection”, Greshake et al 2023

• “A Sociological Study of the Official History of the Perceptrons Controversy”, Olazaran1993 (did Minsky kill connectionism… or did lack of compute & ideas how to train multi-layer NNs kill it first and Perceptrons was just the obituary?)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Genome-wide risk prediction of common diseases across ancestries in one million people”, Mars et al 2023

• “Overcoming attenuation bias in regressions using polygenic indices”, van Kippersluis et al 2023 (how to correct for measurement error in using PGSes)

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “The Future of Fertility: A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction”

• “GDNF gene therapy for alcohol use disorder in male non-human primates”, Ford et al 2023

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?” (on industry labs)

• “Practicing Western Science Outside the West: Personal Observations on the Indian Scene”, Choudhuri1985

• “Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History”, Stuart Buck

• “The Hidden Harms of CPR: The brutal procedure can save lives, but only in particular cases. Why has it become a default treatment?”

• ‘Wisdom of the Crowd vs. “the Best of the Best of the Best”’ on Metaculus

• “Experimental Human Scurvy”, Crandon et al 1940; “Self-Experimentation in Nutrition Research”, Widdowson1993

• It’s not aliens.

Politics/Religion

• “Blundering on the Brink: The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis”; “It’s time for a new atomic altruism: Philanthropies are pulling back from programs meant to address the risk of nuclear war—at precisely the wrong moment”

• “Insights into the accuracy of social scientists’ forecasts of societal change”, The Forecasting Collaborative2023; “Harm Hypervigilance in Public Reactions to Scientific Evidence”, Clark et al 2023 (censorship Noble Lies fail again)

• “Those Who Said ‘No!’: Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians during World War II”, Kitterman1988

• The Moulin Rouge Hotel (the virtue of vice)

Psychology/Biology

• “Centenarian clocks: epigenetic clocks for validating claims of exceptional longevity”, Dec et al 2023

• “Longevity Factor Klotho Enhances Cognition in Aged Nonhuman [Rhesus Macaque] Primates”, Castner et al 2023

• “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis”, Willett et al 2023; “A high-performance neuroprosthesis for speech decoding and avatar control”, Metzger et al 2023

• “The rocky road from actions to intentions”, Newton1990 (no one can tell what song you’re humming or tapping)

• “Reflective journal entries using GPT-4 and Obsidian that demand less willpower” by dialogue/queries + annotation + summarization

Technology

• “Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge: How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers”

• “Vesuvius Challenge: Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano”; Nat Friedman: “Reading Ancient Scrolls, Open Source, & AI”

• “Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly-heavy baryons”, Karliner & Rosner2017

• “Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability” (level design preference learning: predicting high-quality soluble mazes using human feedback from quitting rates)

• “Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography”

Economics

• “Not By g Alone: The Benefits of a College Education among Individuals With Low Levels of General Cognitive Ability”, McGue et al 2022

• “Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?”, Moshary et al 2023

• “Return to the Econ”, Gans2023

Philosophy

Fiction

• “Killing Time: Dracula and Social Discoordination”, Robbins2014; “Turning Back the Economic Clock: The real danger embodied by Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Robbins2022; “Bram Stoker, Dracula, and Progress Studies”, Tyler Cowen 2022

• “The Perception of Rhythm in Language”, Cutler1994

• “Hiawatha’s Lipid”, Sinclair1960

• Never Die Twice (to clarify the ending: similar to Devilman, as this is a retelling of Völuspá, the protagonist has indeed failed to stop the cycle of reincarnation, and merely delayed it; his inability to love anyone but himself dooms his efforts to break free, although—just like the ending of Völuspá with the golden chessboard—we are left with hope that progress has been made due to the exogenous shock of ideas from contemporary Earth isekai-ed in, and that many cycles from now Walter may finally succeed in freeing himself from death for a better reason than just that.)

Miscellaneous

• “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”, Tyler Vigen

• The Tottenham Outrage: an epic pram chase & shootout

• The Eglinton Tournament: the last medieval tournament