October 2016 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Genome-wide association study of antisocial personality disorder", Rautiainen et al 2016 (GWAS hits on crime)
• "The Causal Effects of Education on Health, Mortality, Cognition, Well-being, and Income in the UK Biobank", Davies et al 2016
• "Shared genetic aetiology of puberty timing between sexes and with health-related outcomes", Day et al 2015 (Most correlations are bad, as predicted by life cycle theory.)
• "Genomic analyses for age at menarche identify 389 independent signals and indicate BMI-independent effects of puberty timing on cancer susceptibility", Day et al 2016b
• "Evidence that low socioeconomic position accentuates genetic susceptibility to obesity", Tyrrell et al 2016

Politics/religion:

• "'Superbug' scourge spreads as U.S. fails to track rising human toll" (The weakness of US public health statistics on the spread of antibiotic resistance.)
• "The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules", Rossi 1987
• "The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11", Mueller & Stewart 2012
• "The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer's life"
• Malcolm X's life of crime

AI:

• "WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio"
• "Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning", Zhu et al 2016 (video)
• "Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations", Covington et al 2016
• "Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network", Ledig et al 2016
• "Hyper Networks", Ha et al 2016 (blog)
• "Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold", Zhu et al 2016b
• "Challenges for Brain Emulation: Why Is It So Difficult?", Cattell & Parker 2012
• NN architectures depicted graphically

Statistics/meta-science/mathematics:

• "Saving Science: Science isn't self-correcting, it's self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world."
• "Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes", Ord et al 2008
• "Predicting Experimental Results: Who Knows What?", DellaVigna & Pope 2016
• "The Solution of the n-body Problem", Diacu 1996
• "If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?"
• /r/estimation

Psychology/biology:

• "Morphometricity as a measure of the neuroanatomical signature of a trait", Sabuncu et al 2016 (Heritability/variance component estimation generalized to brain volume/thickness: demonstrates that brain structure can predict a large fraction of variance among Alzheimers & aging (~1), IQ (0.95), etc, and so those traits have causal relationships (of some sort) with brain volume/thickness. While the causal relationships may not turn out to be interesting (we already knew brain volumes and thicknesses are catastrophically affected by aging and Alzheimer's), it does at least imply that as brain imaging datasets get larger, they will get ever better at predicting whether a subject has Alzheimers or how intelligent a person is. Hopefully we'll see variance components taken seriously outside of genetics. If power analysis tells you whether you have enough light to find the needles in the haystack, variance components can tell you whether there are even any needles to look for.)
• "Treatment of Psychopathy: A Review of Empirical Findings", Harris & Rice 2006
• "How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Super-smart Children"
• "Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication", Panero et al 2016
• "Failing Your Goals with Beeminder"
• "Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal", Patitsas et al 2016
• "Thomas Jefferson Defends America With a Moose"
• "Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: rapid evolution of an introduced sexually transmitted disease?", Knell 2004
• "How to confuse a moral compass: Survey 'magic trick' causes attitude reversal"
• "Melatonin Treatment Effects on Adolescent Students' Sleep Timing and Sleepiness in a Placebo-Controlled Crossover Study", Eckerberg et al 2012

Technology:

• "Capacity-approaching DNA storage", Erlich & Zielinski 2016 (If DNA storage gets real-world usage, it might help accelerate the DNA synthesis cost-curve, and we could get whole genome synthesis years before I project!)
• "Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip", Skorobogatov & Woods 2012
• "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling", Wheeler 2009
• "Turning 8-Bit Sprites into Printable 3D Models"
• "Magic: the Gathering is Turing Complete"

Economics:

• "Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny? How migration shapes the prosperity of countries"
• "When It Rains It Pours: The Long-run Economic Impacts of Salt Iodization in the United States", Adhvaryu et al 2016
• "Signaling and Productivity in the Private Financial Returns to Schooling", Bingley et al 2015 (As I've mentioned before, even if you aren't all that interested in heritability or genetic correlations, twins and family studies are still vital for causal inference in economics/medicine/sociology because they control for so many things.)
• "China's Gold Rush in the Hills of Appalachia: Buyers in Hong Kong and Beijing are paying top dollar for wild American ginseng, fueling a digging frenzy that could decimate the revered root for good"
• "Good Policy or Good Luck? Country growth performance and temporary shocks", Easterly et al 1993
• Experience curve effects
• "Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client"
• "Lehman Brothers, We Heard You Were Dead"

Philosophy:

• "Logical Induction", Garrabrant et al 2016
• "Not By Empathy Alone"
• "The Wisest Steel Man"

Fiction:

• Ted Chiang:

  • "Exhalation"
  • "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

"The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease: Milk-borne Typhoid and Epidemiological Practice in Late Victorian Britain" J. S. Williams. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol. 65, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 514-545. If anyone's interested but cannot access the article, PM me and I will send you a copy (made by print-screening the pages from 'net and assembling the images into a .doc file).

A verbose, but on the whole interesting read on an uphill battle fought in 1860-s - 1890-s to have adulterated milk recognized as public health risk. Includes a "subplot" which would make a wonderful period-drama detective story (the typhoid outbreak in London, 1873).

• Modern Japanese Diaries, Donald Keene (review)

• The Bridge to Lucy Dunn, Exurb1a (review)

The ballads of Marko Kraljevic, especially "Marko's Ploughing" (p. 158). I liked it better in Russian translation (smoother meter), but this one is OK, too.

Why: a long and detailed legend of a lesser mediaeval king, in brutal, brief, and wondrous songs

• Chirin no Suzu/Ringing Bell (review)
• Soul Eater) (review)

I saw the 2015 remake of Death Note, and I was so disappointed. :(

The goal of the remake was probably to make the conflict of two highly intelligent opponents more accessible to an audience of normies. Not a bad idea per se; I actually liked some of the changes.

The problem is that while making the changes, they introduced a few obvious logical errors, probably as a side effect of trying to make some scenes more dramatic. Which matters a lot in a story based on the premise that two highly intelligent opponents are fighting by exploiting each other's smallest mistakes; and then something completely stupid happens and no one notices, most likely because the author of the remake didn't notice it.

I'll try to avoid being unnecessarily specific; but here is the general pattern: In the story universe, it is possible to cast magical spells on other people. If certain preconditions are met, the magic makes people follow a script specified by the caster. If the preconditions are not met, nothing happens. (There is no such thing as partially meeting the preconditions; it's either yes or no.)

However, at least twice in the series the following happens: The mage casts the spell with a sequence of unlikely actions on someone. The victim does the unlikely action A, then does the unlikely action B, and then... as a big surprise... at last moment it turns out they don't do the remaining unlikely action C! How is that possible? Turns out someone else outsmarted the mage and made some of the preconditions fail, so the magic spell didn't work.

I guess at this moment the audience is supposed to cheer for the smart opponent, but I am left scratching my head: so, if the preconditions of the spell were not met, how was it possible in the first place that the victim did the unlikely actions A and B? The magic spell was cast in privacy; the victim had no chance to know the values of A, B, C. The victim didn't expect the spell to be cast; in one case the victim's unusual behavior was a new information for the opponent. It wasn't a coincidence; in one case the victim went to a specified abandoned place and pretended to be dead.

I generally don't mind something slightly illogical here and then, if the plot requires it. But in this specific case, it ruined the essence of the story. After this, "intelligent opponents cleverly gaining information by exploiting each other's small mistakes" became merely an applause light without substance.

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