September 2014 Media Thread

August reading roundup; everything is heritable:

• "A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?" (see "Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins", "The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals", & "A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans")
• How harmful is smoking during pregnancy - after controlling for the sort of people who would do that?
• "On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits", Hsu 2014
• "Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs", Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
• Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment
• "The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes", Tesser 1993 (excerpts)
• "Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)", Helbig 1991 ("For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.")

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Personal reflections on lessons learned from randomized trials involving newborn infants, 1951 to 1967", Silverman 2003 (9 out of 10 dead babies agree: even cherished 'obvious' beliefs must be tested by RCTs)
• "Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer", Franco et al 2014 (Nature; Andrew Gelman; excerpts)
• "Better Estimation When Perfection Is Unlikely: A Bayesian Example"
• "The Lyme Wars: The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.", "What Science Needs"
• "Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine", Hales 2013 (excerpts)
• "On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments", "Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed" (excerpts)
• "Academic urban legends", Rekdal 2014
• "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal"

Psychology:

• "Metabolic costs and evolutionary implications of human brain development", Kuzawa et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Lead exposure and behavior: effects on antisocial and risky behavior among children and adolescents", Reyes 2014
• "Bastards and Stereotype Accuracy"
• "How are conscientiousness and cognitive ability related to one another? A re-examination of the intelligence compensation hypothesis", Murray et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Investigating America's elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences", Wai 2013 (excerpts)
• "What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?"
• "Standard and trace-dose lithium: A systematic review of dementia prevention and other behavioral benefits", Mauer et al 2014
• Puppy pregnancy syndrome

Technology:

• Hal Finney has died (NYT)
• "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality"
• "Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule"
• "Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing", Nordhaus 2007 (excerpts)

Economics:

• "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills", Clark 1987 (excerpts)
• "How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall"
• "What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?"
• Rag-picker

Politics/religion:

• "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did: Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?"
• Gombe Chimpanzee War
• Bedford Level experiment
• "The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage"

Fiction:

• 2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far, but nevertheless, I would happily rewatch Azumanga Daioh, Haibane Renmei, & RahXephon any number of times, and picked up some interesting suggestions for future watching like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space.)
• "The Too-Clever Fox"
• TvTropes reviews Nature of Nature's Art webcomic

Misc:

• Evolution of E. Coli over 60k generations
• "War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy"
• "A Parable", Dijkstra 1973 (Orienting toilets on train cars.)
• Judas goat
• "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit: For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine"

The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering - Somewhat changed my view about the scale of wildlife suffering and the sentience of non-domesticated animal species

Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom - On insight porn and what kind of people LW and the related memeplex tend to attract

The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains by Anders Sanberg (1999) - paper discussing what computers up against the limits of physics might look like (skip to the end for some interesting examples)

Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom

The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering

http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-animal-suffering

I think you're getting the nesting/indentation wrong: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Comment_formatting#Lists http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#list

• The Metropolitan Man (review)

I'm going to go ahead and recommend the entire Vorkosigan saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I advise reading in chronological timeline order (except for the prequel "Falling Free" which only loosely bears on the rest of the series's events and characters - so start with Shards of Honor). Before I read these books I had heard HPMoR glossed as "Miles Vorkosigan attends Hogwarts", and while this does neither character perfect justice, it was a lot truer than I anticipated.

August books (no nonfiction, procrastinating on reading a few):

• Worm (review)
• Echopraxia, Peter Watts (review)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez (review)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (review)

• The Truth
• Going Postal
• Making Money
• Raising Steam

"The second interesting thing about angels, Mr. Lipwig, is that you only ever get one."

This is an information bounty, in exchange for helping me out I'm offering a half hour of my time (best redeemed through EA, corresponding research or teaching anything you need to know about civil engineering.) Now to the request so unreasonable that I felt compensation was necessary.

I once read a transhumanism short story by Isaac Asimov but have forgot the title and short story collection it was in, I'm trying to find this story again. The plot summary goes as such: A retired businessman is reminiscing about the frontier days of cognitive enhancement where 'chipped' professionals were a high value rarity and his firm was so lucky to have the opportunity to interview two at the same time and he had to choose which one to hire. A key limiter to the 'chipping' was that those professionals were ten times as smart for one tenth the productive lifespan, meaning early onset of senility and retirement. The retired businessman laments that the current generation of 'chipping' is so dialed down and legislated that they are nothing special.

If this rings a bell and you can give me a title to this short story, you will have my eternal gratitude (redeemable for one half hour of time.)

Finished Psycho-Pass (first season on Netflix). Briefly, it's the spiritual successor to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, directed by Gen Urobuchi (Fate/Zero, Black Lagoon) and animated by Production I.G (GITS, Attack on Titan). Same format as GITS:SAC -- female/male detective team in a somewhat dystopian future investigating a horrific criminal mastermind. The technology level is set slightly lower than GITS -- cyborg bodies are possible but expensive, and it's not possible to emulate a human brain yet.

The titular psycho-pass (which is a pun in Japanese for psychopath) is a metric (associated to a color scale, from white to black) measuring a person's criminal capacity. In this future Japan, everyone's psycho-pass is monitored extremely carefully. People whose psycho-pass becomes "clouded" by stress or mental illness eventually become latent criminals and are contained in isolation until either their psycho-pass clears or they die. Crime still happens, and the criminal justice system uses a combination of inspectors and enforcers to neutralize criminals. Enforcers are latent criminals that have chosen to work in the police force under the close watch of their inspectors. Their weapon of choice is the Dominator, a hand-held electronic pulse weapon that ranges from non-lethal stun gun to complete obliteration in proportion to the threat's criminal coefficient (0-99 = locked; 100-299 = stun; 300+ = lethal).

The first season follows the main duo, Inspector Akane and her enforcer Kougami, as they hunt down a mysterious criminal mastermind who connects latent criminals with the technical expertise they need to commit their crimes, in lieu of committing crimes himself. Akane is a newbie, so we get the standard newbie introduction to the Sibyl system of inspectors and enforcers, and the danger an inspector faces in maintaining their mental health while investigating horrendous crimes. The pattern of tension between a high-ranking newbie with an experienced subordinate occurs multiple times. Naturally, since this is a dystopia, not everything is as it appears.

The animation is high quality, and is especially brutal at times. Both my partner and I cringed several times at some of the fight scenes because they were painful to watch. There are a few filler episodes, but most of the episodes were worth watching, and they are relatively good at avoiding most of the standard Ghost in the Shell tropes (one exception: early on they do a remake of the classic GITS:SAC episode "Chat! Chat! Chat!"). I gave it 8/10, that is, essentially as good (IMO) as the first season of either GITS:SAC or Fate/Zero.

• I was honestly expecting Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun to run out of jokes an episode or two in, but actually it keeps getting better and better - shaping up to be my favourite comedy so far this year.
• I've been surprisingly taken with Barakamon, a heartwarming slice-of-life. I was expecting a sports-anime style coverage of calligraphy, but actually it's more reminiscent of Usagi Drop or Wolf Children.
• We've been watching Mahouka for the laughs. It starts out fairly unassuming but rapidly becomes one of those shows that is so dire it's actually comedy gold; the main character is the most blatant Gary Stu I have ever seen, and by ep.10 or so it is reminiscent of North Korean propaganda.

In descending order as usual:

• Fuse Teppō Musume no Torimonochō (review)
• Cat Shit One (review)
• The SoulTaker (review)

Happened to watch an old film from the 1950s, Three Coins in the Fountain. Actually not that bad. Sort of a silly romantic comedy of manners, and when you get bored with that, you can pay attention to post-WWII Italy and note how privileged Americans were, how women smoked back then, etc. It feels weird to see offices without computers in them - just papers. and phones. Oh, and random monks in the background: the camera just pans across them like they're not there.

August music:

• "廃獄ララバイ" (Toy; 協奏符「拾遺物語」 {R11}) [symphony]
• "おつかいメイドのひといき" (水橋ゆっきー; Kirisame Mahou Yougashiten {C85}) [instrumental]
• "竹取飛翔" (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• "東方妖々夢" (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• "幽雅に咲かせ、墨染の桜" (k-waves LAB; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• "ほおずきみたいに紅い魂" (k-wave labs; 幽かのたまゆら {C84}) [Celtic]
• "時間差カルテ" (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• "令・瞑コード零" (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• "紅星ミゼラブル～廃憶編" (Tokyo Active NEETs; Touhou Bakuon Jazz 4 {C84}) [jazz]
• "感情の摩天楼 ～ Cosmic Mind" (あきやまうに; 暗黒能楽集・心綺楼 東方心綺楼 ORIGINAL SOUND TRACK {C84}) [instrumental]
• "Thawing Realism" (Autoban feat. Senya; Hiding You in the Evening Cherry Trees {C85}) [trance]
• "NEXTLIFE" (隣人 feat. 坂上なち (twinkle* twinkle); THE LEAP NEXTRA {C84}) [electronic]
• "party in the streets of Tokyo" (Renko; a-romatic {C84}) [house]
• "風の向こうへ" (JeetSingh feat. Chia; Serendipity {R10}) [vocal]
• "voyage" (きりん feat 茶々; con spirito {C85}) [vocal]
• "Cherry Ashes" (senya; The Whole World {C84}) [vocal]

• Swans - To Be Kind. I'm not sure how I feel about it. The production value is excellent, the vocals are powerful, the layering is up there with the best, and yet some of the songs just didn't work for me. Toussaint Louverture!
• And So I Watch You From Afar - All Hail Bright Futures. Pure joy.
• Wolves in the Throne Room - Celestite. A black metal band makes an excellent ambient/drone album with neither vocals nor drums. It's beautiful.

I'm doing a microeconomics podcast that will teach much of the material of an introductory microeconomics course. It's also on iTunes under Microeconomics Podcast with Professor James Miller.

Overly friendly AI: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3468

Finally got around to playing To The Moon, and it is much much better than I expected, to the point where I am now recommending it to everyone. Interactive fiction very much in the spirit if not the mechanics of old point-and-click adventures, it is one of those satisfyingly well-told mysteries where with every reveal you realise all the pieces really were there for you to see whether you managed to put them together or not. Also it is something of a love song to 8-bit RPGs.

Abstruse Goose on human obsolescence:

http://www.abstrusegoose.com/563

Cryonics publicity, and my responses, part 2 of 2.

1. Eldritch horrors, or at least dickish Future People, will do mean things to cryonauts upon their revival. (Sounds familiar, for some reason.)

2. We shouldn't do cryonics because of what happens in dumb popular culture like Idiocracy, Futurama, Star Trek, etc.

3. You won’t know anyone upon revival in Future World.

Resuming:

1. The cryonics idea, because in involves an unusual way of talking about “death” (the neurological off-state), pushes people’s terror management buttons. According the Terror Management Theory in psychology, when we learn about our mortality as children, the knowledge causes a kind of chronic traumatic stress disorder which we spend the rest of our lives managing, in a kludgy way, by constructing and maintaining anxiety buffers which deny death: things like self-esteem, beliefs in human exceptionalism, tribal identity, afterlife fantasies and so forth. And we all know that people think badly under the influence of strong emotions, in this case reminders of death which Terror Management theorists call mortality salience. (When denial of death can actually keep people from dying, we call it “effective health care.”) Cryonics offers a strategy for managing our risk instead of our terror, but most people don’t immediately see that without some amount of explanation, often spoon-fed to the slower learners (and even then they may not catch on); so they construct frankly absurd scenarios about all the bad things that they fear might happen to them, assuming revival.

Many of these faux objections sound like expressions of social anxiety to me (I know about social anxiety from my own experiences) – these Advanced Beings in the Future will do horrible things to me, so I would rather die than meet them! I have to wonder if we have social science instruments to correlate people’s reactions to the cryonics idea with measurable anxiety levels and see if we can find less anxious demographics which cryonics organizations could try marketing to.

1. Unserious people invoke pop culture crap like Futurama, a cartoon series which seemed funny to me for about four or five episodes before I lost interest in it. I don’t even bother engaging such individuals.

The episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation, titled “The Neutral Zone,” brings up an addressable point, however. In this episode, Dr. Crusher revives a cryopreserved financier who gives a performance which makes me wonder if the screenwriters knew a real cryonicist with money and used him as a model. The character’s personality seemed to have a lot of verisimilitude to me, in other words. This character tries to find what had happened to the investments he had set aside in trusts on Earth, only to discover that his wealth has mysteriously disappeared without explanation.

Now, this could happen given some major economic, social or political disruption, I suppose. But in the real world, trusts have lasted for generations without anyone stealing them empty. H.G. Wells even wrote the first story connecting suspended animation and exponentially compounding wealth in trusts early in the 20th Century, both as a short story and as a novel, under the names “When the Sleeper Wakes” and The Sleeper Awakes, respectively. People have left wealth in trusts which have lasted for a century or more where trustees have preserved their assets and faithfully carried out the trustors’ wishes, subject to interpretation in case a trustor leaves ambiguous instructions. And we can point to well known examples of trusts established in the late 17th Century by Benjamin Franklin, and in the 19th Century by Stephen Girard, James Smithson and Alfred Nobel. You could probably include charitable trusts set up early in the 20th Century by John Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon as additional examples of successful asset preservation across the decades.

In other words, in the real world, trustees generally don’t loot and make trusts disappear just because the trustors died decades ago and they think no one cares any more. So the people who bring up this scenario for the assets cryonicists have set aside in speculative revival trusts, like in the Star Trek episode, simply show their ignorance of trusts’ historical track record.

1. What happens to people now when they discover that they don’t know anyone? This sounds like another kind of objection to cryonics based on social anxiety. Have they lost their ability to make new friends? I haven’t maintained friendships with anyone I knew in the first 30 years of my life. I’ve also lost several of my relatives already, including all of my grandparents; my 87 year old father could die any day now.

How many people have I at least met who have gone into cryo? Probably more than a dozen, and I got to know David Zubkoff well because we worked together for a year in the late 1990’s.

Do I feel alienated because of all the people I can no longer communicate with? No, because I have made new friends, even in the past couple of years. And no one would characterize me as outgoing or extroverted, by any means. If people have the capacity to make new friends throughout life, then why wouldn’t that continue to operate in the future?

If anything, you might even find it easier to make friends in Future World if the people of that time have enhanced empathy and social skills so that they can pick up on your tells more readily and adjust their responses to you to make you comfortable with them.

If you’ve run across similar ill-considered objections to cryonics, how have you addressed them?

Please read the rule that says "Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread". This should have been under Meta, or in response to one of gwern's comments.

Maybe Gwern should have a site where they put their links on or something...