February 2015 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?", Alford et al 2005 (excerpts)
• "Paternal Antisocial Behavior and Sons' Cognitive Ability: A Population-Based Quasiexperimental Study", Latvala et al 2014 (excerpts)
• "Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication", Carneiro et al 2014 (the power of selection - complex behaviors influenced by many small changes; excerpts)

Politics/religion:

• "Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell"
• "The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics", Abrahms 2013 (excerpts; Why does terrorism so rarely succeed in policy goals compared to guerrilla warfare, and trigger backfire effects? Because use of terrorist tactics triggers the horns effect; given the same hypothetical, they are perceived as fundamentally hateful, unable to keep negotiated commitments, & intrinsically preferring violence.)
• "Blonde cargoes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea"
• "New poll finds majority of Americans believe torture justified after 9/11 attacks"
• "Jihadi Radicalization of Muslim Clerics", Nielsen 2012 (excerpts)

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "Framing For Light Instead Of Heat" (What do we mean by 'controlling' in statistics and is it what we think it means?)
• "Site Selection Bias in Program Evaluation", Allcott 2014 (on one reason programs 'fade out'; of particular concern in effective altruism; excerpts)
• "Probable Points and Credible Intervals, Part 2: Decision Theory"
• "Bayes' rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don't work"
• "Kalkalash! Pinpointing the Moments The Simpsons became less Cromulent"

Psychology/biology:

• "Artificial Selection on Relative Brain Size in the Guppy Reveals Costs and Benefits of Evolving a Larger Brain", Kotrschal et al 2013 (excerpts; fascinating little experiment - it's odd the males showed no intelligence gain, and selecting on volume isn't exactly what you want to select on, but I'd love to see what a larger experiment ran for more generations showed.)
• "Clinical outcome of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing", Tan et al 2014 (excerpts)
• Alexander Shulgin obituary
• "Wireheading: Towards a Consumer Market?" (excerpts)
• "Secrets of the Magus: Ricky Jay does closeup magic that flouts reality"

Technology:

• "Bitcoin and Me", Hal Finney
• "Programming Sucks"
• "The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot", 2001 (excerpts)
• "The Darkhotel APT: A Story of Unusual Hospitality" (cyberwarfare)
• "Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress", Nagy et al 2013
• "Found on the Web, With DNA: a Boy's Father"
• "Tokyo Polytechnic University Publishes Results of VOCALOID Study"
• A Linux audio tweak to compensate for hearing loss

Economics:

• "A colourful history of progress" (the Industrial Revolution, synthetic dyes, and the environment)
• "Forget It!", Isaac Asimov (on the benefits of standardization, illustrated by an old practical mathematics textbook.)
• "Study of Men’s Falling Income Cites Single Parents" (2013)o
• "Redistributing from Capitalists to Workers: The Chamley-Judd Impossibility Theorem"
• "Net benefits: How to quantify the gains that the internet has brought to consumers"
• "Beware of the survivorship bias: Investors may have developed too rosy a view of equity returns"

Philosophy:

• "A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop" (humor)

Article on Philip Tetlock's new research on predictions in Harvard Business Review

Eternal Youth for All! by Ronald Bailey:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/02/06/eternal-youth-for-all

I found this disappointing because it seems like I read similar articles about imminent breakthroughs in anti-aging back in the 1990's, only the names of the elixirs have changed. Remember the hype about melatonin a few years ago?

MIT"s Leonard Guarente has gone to market with:

The Anti-Aging Pill Facing a long wait for evidence, a longevity researcher takes an unusual path to market.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534636/the-anti-aging-pill/

Guarente's website: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/

At least Guarente understands that it takes a baseline of many decades to see if these experiments make a difference. He doesn't go for this "immortality in 30 years" nonsense that plagues folk transhumanism.

Dr. Bruce Ames did something like this several years ago to promote the use of the combination of acetyl-l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid as an experiment to decelerate aging in human mitochondria:

http://www.juvenon.com/

What Can Supporters Do for Transhumanism? by Zoltan Istvan:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/what-can-supporters-do-fo_b_6564536.html

Zoltan suggests changing careers, assuming that you can find ones which allow for feasible transhumanist-sounding projects to work on.

But I would add the fallback one of just figuring out how to make and save a lot more money to give you the resources to do some of these things.

A Humanist Approach To Environmental Issues, by an Objectivist named Alex Epstein:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/29/a-humanist-approach-to-environmental-issues/

Science’s Biggest Fail

http://franklinmethod.com/latest-news/why-you-shouldnt-grip-your-core-part-2

Explains why pulling your navel towards your back and/or raising your pelvic floor while inhaling makes moving more difficult. Actually, the pelvic floor should increase tone while lengthening during inhalation (this is an eccentric contraction).

For what it's worth, I felt better following the instructions, and I suspect that gripping one's core muscles may be a result of emotional habits as well as a result of following bad advice.

More of Zoltan Istvan, on Reason TV:

What If You Could Live for 10,000 years? Q&A with Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pi52PNL_c0&feature=youtu.be

Michael Shermer plugs his new book, The Moral Arc [Reactor?]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIw25wzbGtU

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/the-moral-arc-author-gets-in-the-hot-seat-386643011696

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB6T5heBylE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVpZKh2Atro

VERY NSFW: Ship of the Line: Forever After Earth which just completed, is a very very smutty 24-chapter crossover between Buffy, Stargate: SG-1, and the author's own original transhumanist fiction. (And in later chapters, characters from other fictional universes like Nanoha and Madoka also contribute).

I'm linking it here, partly because the author is very clearly familiar with the LessWrong community, though I don't know whether he posts here under some different name. Whether I recommend it or not... I recommend it for those who would read R-rated stories, but the plot personally lost me towards the end when characters from more fictional universes started appearing -- perhaps because I wasn't as familiar with those characters, but also I think they just weren't necessary: I think the story would have actually likely been better if it had omitted them altogether and just finished with gur gevb'f zhygv-qrcnegher gb fcernq vzzbegnyvgl npebff gur cynargf bs gur tnynkl.

On my part I enjoyed the depiction of a culture whose members seems almost entirely without any fear of physical harm or physical intimacy either.

TRIGGER WARNINGS for a few depictions of rape. Also that the post-humans in question can't be physically or emotionally harmed by such, causes them to view rapes against them as merely "rude".

Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth

Not a technical book about the Apollo program by any means. The author goes around finding and interviewing all the surviving moonwalkers as of the time he was writing it (9) about the effect the event had on their lives. Some report massive changes in perspective about the Earth. Some feel massively betrayed by NASA, having taken part in something they felt was the first step in a direction and which was then not followed up on (be the reasons for that good or bad). There's pretty much as many reactions as there are moonwalkers.

But then, most fascinating to me was the difference between living the history and watching the history. Armstrong and Aldrin on Apollo 11 didn't really appreciate how much importance was projected on their mission and how much mythologization of the event was going on back home, with half a billion people watching them live (and indeed it was the first huge live media event of this type). They were just doing their jobs - and then the president gets on the line with them on the surface of the moon and they scramble to not make asses of themselves talking extemporaneously while lugging around hundreds of kg of equipment on their backs. And when they get back and are in isolation (as all the first moonwalkers were in case of living microbes on the moon) and are dealing with a constant parade of dignitaries outside their little window, eventually they gather the gravitas that the event had for the world at large. Aldrin turns to Armstrong and says "Neil, we missed it!"

Currently reading Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914" so far the book has two upshots: nationalism makes people really irrational. No, you think you already know that, but you don't realize how far it can go. No, more irrational than that. Second, it is really easy for things to spiral out of control. Reading it has made me strongly update to the probability that there will be a large-scale war in the next few years, and in general that war might be a major aspect of the Great Filter. A relevant, somewhat critical review of the book is here.

• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (see Yvain)
• Spam Nation (review)

Listening to the third book in The First Law trilogy. I really like the characters and their internal narrative, as well as the writing style. The pace is pretty slow, but I never found it boring, happy to follow the characters' thoughts and actions. Inquisitor Glokta is probably my favorite, because of his dry wit and cynicism, with just a pinch of humanity.

• finished off Hannu's quantum thief trilogy: The Fractal Prince & The Causal Angel (the last prominently features CEV under that name, incidentally)
• The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq (review)

Just read Brandon Sanderson's "Firefight" which is the sequel to Steelheart. Sanderson is as amazing as usual. The books are a very novel take on the idea of superpowers.

Read Christopher Nuttall's "Schooled in Magic" series. I'd describe it as HPMoR but with a main character who is a) slightly more mature and b) not nearly as smart or educated. Overall, while I've had a mixed view of a lot of Nuttall's other works I have a high opinion of this one.

Currently reading Annie Bellet's "The 20-Sided Sorceress" series which is an urban fantasy setting where the main character grew up thinking of magic in terms of Dungeons and Dragons and uses a D20 talisman to focus her magic. Not too surprisingly it is full of geek-culture references. Overall, amusing.

Started watching Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit.

Set during an AU feudal Japan (and if we ever tire of AU feudal Japan, you'll know that the upload you have of paper machine is not genuine), Moribito tells the story of the epic-level bodyguard Balsa and her quest to save the life of the Emperor's second son, Chagum, who has been possessed by the egg of a water spirit.

So far, Balsa is an exceptional strategist with a wide utilitarian streak. She's slightly reminiscent of Mokoto Kusanagi (and is animated by Production I.G). Chagum is slightly whiny but is growing on me. We often moan about the lack of strong female leads in anime, but hopefully Moribito continues to break the mould.

There's also some underlying Mononoke-esque humans vs. nature going on, so if you like that, you'll probably like this too.

Anime:

• Hozuki no Reitetsu
• Futakoi Alternative (review)

Quarterly groupwatched anime batch:

• Rage of Bahamut Genesis: Much better than it had any right to be; a lot of fun, plenty of flashy visual effects (perhaps too flashy in the last couple of episodes, but even so). Not something with any real depth or ambition; nothing the genre hasn't seen before (though it's been a while since I saw a protagonist with this particular level of... not exactly evil, but cowardice and shadiness - and the snarky zombie sorcerer is very fun). But I enjoyed it from start to finish - last month ISTR someone was unhappy with the gods and demons at the end, but that's de rigeur for the genre and the cast needed new factors IMO.

• Psycho-Pass 2: Nowhere near the quality of the original; very inconsistent pacing, too little characterization, too heavy-handed with the ultraviolence, gaping plot holes. I still enjoyed it, but on a Guilty Crown level where I sat back and let the craziness play out.

• Nobunaga Concerto: managed to keep a simple premise interesting throughout its run, along with plenty of basic comedy staples and a surprisingly good ending theme. Not one for the ages, but diverting enough if you can put up with the very basic animation.

• Mushishi (first series): very much a work of art, very understated, with real moral ambiguity at times. But I grew frustrated with the way the world made no sense (or rather, followed storytelling logic rather than any internal logic of its own) and the very strictly episodic nature of the show; nothing ever changes or matters to characters we care about. I don't think I'll be watching any more.

• Amagi Brilliant Park: plenty of good parts (and KyoAni production values), but never manages to fit them together into a decent whole. The comedy works well, but the dramatic plot manages to be both horribly forced and borderline-irrelevant. The overarching plot makes very little sense, and virtually disappears for the middle of the series. Even with all its flaws I can't call it a bad show, because it was still fun to watch, but it could have been so much better.

If you are reading this, Ex Machina is almost certainly a film you would be interested in watching.

ETA: some elaboration - this is a film about artificial intelligence. It's quite smartly done, and is probably the most intelligent cinematic treatment of LW-flavoured AI concepts released to date. It won't blow your mind, and it's not a cinematic masterpiece, but it might just set the tone for future popular discussion on the subject.

I recently watched the first season of the show Homeland and really liked it. The drama and action were good, but what I liked in particular is that the situations had some moral depth to them, and it isn't perfectly clear who to like/what to root for. I don't want to give anything away, but basically the story line revolves around a recently rescued POW who may have been "turned". If you've seen the show and want to talk about it, message me!

I highly recommend Wolf Hall, both as entertainment and as rationality material. Like any adaptation, it loses something from the books, but it is extremely well written and acted, which makes up for some of that.

To life!

Stuff I've been listening to lately

• Young Fathers - "Romance"
• Crystal Castles - "Vanished"
• Bjork - "Stonemilker"
• M83 - "Wait"
• Jimmy Wahlsteen - "181st song"
• Olafur Arnalds - "Hands, be still"

Misc:

• "COME SWEET DEATH,SECOND IMPACT" (Shiro Sagisu feat. Megumi Hayashibara; The world EVAngelion JAZZ night =The Tokyo III Jazz club= {2014}) [jazz]

Touhou:

• "Extend Ash ~ Hourai Victim" (Studio A'; BorderLine {C68}) [instrumental rock]
• "Shanghai Alice of Meiji 17" (樋口秀樹; BorderLine {C68}) [instrumental]

Doujin:

• "きつねうどん (Kitsune Udon)" (marasy; Kitsune no Nikkichou {C84}) [classical]
• "狐の日記帖" (marasy; Kitsune no Nikkichou {C84}) [classical]

Kantai Collection:

• "Happy Wedding" (BubbleRecords; SUMMER AIRCRAFT {C86}) [classical/electronic]
• "Goodbye Admiral" (BubbleRecords; SUMMER AIRCRAFT {C86}) [trance]

Vocaloid:

• "Sadness" (Miku? hitsuji; にこにこ {2009}) [progressive rock]
• "アマツキツネ (Amatsu Kitsune)" (marasy; Kitsune no Nikkichou {C84}) [classical]
• "天照ラセ (Amaterase)" (marasy; Kitsune no Nikkichou {C84}) [classical]
• "Helianthus" (Gumi; PlantyP; Silent Paradiso -EXTEND- {2013}) [trance]
• "Clarity (Planty Arrange)" (IA; PlantyP; Silent Paradiso -EXTEND- {2013}) [vocal]

BBC Inside Health: Drug Driving; End of Life Care; Smart Drugs, also available as mp3. The smart drugs piece starts at 16m 58s.

Mostly I mention it as mainstream(ish) coverage of the topic, which I though note worthy.

The Raccoon Princess and the Fox Prince: A Bayesian Parable

Looks pretty good, and perhaps they can team up with whoever was developing the Bayes game here.

However, there's an unsupported assumption here: we don't know that raccoons and fox have the same crime rate. Without data, I'd say that the larger animals probably have a larger rate, so it shifts more in that direction.

Question: Does it make sense to post in these threads "I read X, don't bother for the following reasons" or should we only restrict to recommendations of what to read/listen/watch?

Thanks for your contribution. However, it would be great if you could posr under the appropriate top level comment in the future so that people can more easily determine which type of media you're recommending.