October 2015 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "74 SNP hits on cognitive ability from 300k individuals"
• "...intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ...", Piffer 2015
• "Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe", Robinson et al 2015 (to quote Yvain: "Genetic differences explain 24% of between-national-populations differences in height and 8% of between-national-populations in BMI across Europe. Now that the only two massively polygenic traits that might vary among national populations have been successfully studied, I look forward to never having to read any further research of this sort ever again."; excerpts)
• "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality", Penke et al 2007 (holds up well after the GWASes for IQ & OCEAN; although prediction that OCEAN hits will be more plentiful than IQ seems to have fallen victim to personality being somewhat more polygenic than expected & non-additive)
• "Eugenics, Ready or Not", Salter

Politics/religion:

• "est, Werner Erhard, and the corporatization of self-help"
• "The End of History?"
• Queue hairstyle
• "Malcolm X's Purge, Second Thoughts, and Murder (Chapters 16-19, plus Haley's Epilogue)"

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

• "The Bayesian Reproducibility Project" (interpreting the psychology reproducibility projects' results not by uninterpretable p-values but by a direct Bayesian examination of whether the replications support or contradict the originals)
• "The Most Dangerous Equation" (sample size and standard error; examples: coinage, disease rates, small schools, male test scores.)
• "Correlation, Causation, and Confusion"
• Galton's problem (Another name for pseudoreplication/autocorrelation/hierarchical-structure/non-independence. Definitely a concern in cross-racial genetics when you're using population-level averages.)
• "The perilous plight of the (non)-replicator"
• "School Desegregation and Black Achievement: an integrative review", Wortman & Bryant 1985 (more on publication bias)
• "Empirical evidence of bias in treatment effect estimates in controlled trials with different interventions and outcomes: meta-epidemiological study", Wood et al 2008
• "aRrgh: a newcomer's (angry) guide to R" (I read this when starting out with R; in retrospect, it turned out to be more useful than I thought at the time)
• "Guessing the Truth: How good are we at guessing the truth of open conjectures?"
• "The Mayan Doomsday's effect on survival outcomes in clinical trials", Wheatley-Price et al 11 Dec 2012

Psychology/biology:

• "A 2-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of Human Caloric Restriction: Feasibility and Effects on Predictors of Health Span and Longevity" (the CALERIE study), Ravussin et al 2015 (excerpts)
• "The Zombie Preacher of Somerset"
• "Operation Delirium: Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets"
• Rind et al. controversy

Technology:

• "1 to 10 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy"
• the Vallejo kidnappings (This is so cyberpunk a true-crime story even Gibson wouldn't dare write a novel about it. I was baffled when I originally read it, and I'm still baffled now.)
• "The Web We Lost"
• Physics Special Topics
• "Predicting and controlling NetHack's randomness"
• "The hum that helps to fight crime"
• "Norvig's Law"

Economics:

• "Crockford's Club: How a Fishmonger Built a Gambling Hall and Bankrupted the British Aristocracy"
• "There are four ways to get fired from Caesars: (1) theft, (2) sexual harassment, (3) running an experiment without a control group, and (4) keeping a gambling addict away from the casino"
• "Housewife, "Gold Miss," and Equal: The Evolution of Educated Women's Role in Asia and the U.S.", Hwang 2013
• "Money, Dear Boy"

Fiction:

• "Biases of Fiction"
• "Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today", Horvath et al 2012

The Wikipedia article on Dukka

The history of England by Jane Austen. To a non-English person, at least, curious and sometimes morbidly light-hearted.

Half-way through Dangerous Women), edited by one G.R.R. Martin. The stories are hit and miss for me, and some actually end up with the supposedly dangerous woman being defeated by fate or stronger men. Some of my favorite so far include the Dresden Files spin-off and a short story by Lawrence Block. Typically strong entries from Joe Abercrombie and Brandon Sanderson.

Rick and Morty season 2 is absolutely brilliant and hilarious. If you guys haven't watched it - you should, it's amazing.

• The Theory of Everything):

  biopic of Stephen Hawking, focusing on his first marriage to Jane Wilde as a student until the divorce. Flaws include the standard Hollywood portrayal of geeks and some lamentably missed opportunities for explaining the ideas involved in Hawking's life-work - for example, in explaining Hawking radiation, which is probably one of the easiest and most interesting possible ideas in 20th century cosmology to explain in a few seconds for laymen, the director instead decides to cut back and forth between Hawking's lecture and an incoherent pub discussion of same. I also have to wonder if debates about God were really as central to their lives as the movie made them, as they felt shoe-horned in; physicists tend to only bring up God in a Noble Lie way, for funding. What is good - perhaps even great - about the movie, is (a) the remarkable job Eddie Redmayne does in acting out the physical deterioration of Hawking, so uncannily well that my suspension of disbelief became absolute and I totally forgot that he was not really Hawking himself, and (b) the decay of the Hawkings' marriage and eventual divorce, which is an unexpected topic to focus on but made sense once I learned it was based on Jane Wilde's memoirs. I was not sure it was worth watching in the early part showing the romance, but once Hawking's ALS enters the plot, then it became gripping for me.

Why we fight - A speech by late AIDS activist Vito Russo. Text transcript available here. It reminds me of the character, but not the content of Reagan's A time for choosing speech [link to text transcript].

• exhaust yourself
• abstain from motivation porn
• be appropriately engaged

Touhou:

• "eye" (Syrufit feat. Mei Ayakura; TRATRA -Extra Track- {TM2010}) [trance]
• "Sakura, Sakura～ Japanese Dream..." (Alstroemeria Records; against, perfect cherry blossom. {C66}) [ambient/trance]
• "Day and Night" (Maurits Cornelis feat. Vivienne; World Trick {C88}) [Jpop]
• "Whole lotta love-spark" (Moon-Tone; Downtime Sessions - Toho Relax {R12}) [ambient]
• "The drive home" (Moon-Tone; Downtime Sessions - Toho Relax {R12}) [ambient]

Doujin:

• "youthful" (スズム; 青春の味と空論の君 {C84}) [instrumental]

White noise, but not quite. I looked up white noise cause some school girls were talking loudly in the library. But this is...well it's music.

Quite good Omega Tau interview on failure modes of mega projects: http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-what-to-do-about-it/

Tim Ferris on Soundcloud, including an interview with Thiel. I find lots of Ferris's content to be low information/time, but the Thiel interview was great. Perhaps he's very adaptive and I can learn something from that.

Undertale is a deconstruction of RPGs, and video games in general. While, as in most, you are given the option to fight enemies, random encounters turn out to be NPCs in the overworld. If you avoid harming anyone, instead using the MERCY option, the game becomes a heartwarming and heartbreaking experience.

If, instead, you grind out the encounters, you will be treated as the genocidal scum you are.

I've done my best avoid spoilers here, as to be quite honest, this is an incredible experience to play through yourself. As far as the gameplay goes, it makes overtures at being an RPG -- ATK, DEF, LV, EXP -- but combat plays out like a bullet hell on the defense. Its music is amazing, too; the creator of the game was originally a composer before he branched out into programming, and it shows.

I truly can't recommend this game enough. It was an incredibly inspiring experience to play, and I am far from the only one to feel that way. Without spoiling too much, the gameplay and story intertwine -- and while it comes across hammy sometimes, that's usually intentional -- and moreover, it works.

It's ten dollars on steam or the humble store, and even though a playthrough (of which, as I alluded to, there are multiple styles) will only last 6-12 hours, I'd pay ten times that.

For those not sure if they're interested, there is a demo available at the Undertale website.

The soundtrack, too, is available (for the most part; a few spoilery end songs are omitted), at the bandcamp here.

• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012 turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Very heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not very imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don't feel any need to play it again.

SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.

The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.

Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury - and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.

Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of 'humanity' and 'alive') and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.

• Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients., on Christopher Murray's Global Burden of Disease
• Practical Criticism, I.A. Richards (an amusing demonstration of the incompetence of most readers in showing the bizarre incomprehension of the plain meaning of many poems and the extreme inconsistency of their critical evaluations thereof, and Richards makes that point at length; still, I remain totally unconvinced by his claim that the "tinkles" poem is of any merit!)
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, Lipsky 2010 (for DFW completionists only. As DFW himself points out during the conversations, a writer is not at his best extemporaneously; any good work is the condensation of the peak moments of months or years. It is interesting to see DFW express his thoughts in a rather raw, unfiltered, and direct way, but I don't think anyone needed confirmation of the standard interpretations of Infinite Jest when he already laid out all his cards in his "E Unibus Pluram" essay on television, did they?)
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (unrateable due to lack of personal experience)