May 2016 Media Thread

Everything is heritable:

• "Genome-wide association study of cognitive functions and educational attainment in UK Biobank (n=112151)", Davies et al 2016

• Continuation of the recent phenome theme of inter-correlations of negative traits and inter-correlation of positive traits:

  • "Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain", Anttila et al 2016
  • "Genetic variants associated with subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism identified through genome-wide analyses", Okbay et al 2016
  • "Physical and neurobehavioral determinants of reproductive onset and success", Day et al 2016
  • "Association between stressful life events and psychotic experiences in adolescence: evidence for gene–environment correlations", Shakoor et al 2016
• "Introducing precise genetic modifications into human 3PN embryos by CRISPR/Cas-mediated genome editing", Kang et al 2016 (see also Liang et al 2015; both describe the CRISPR state of the art as of early 2014, 2+ years ago)
• "Variants near CHRNA3/5 and APOE have age- and sex-related effects on human lifespan", Joshi et al 2016
• "National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration", Proto & Oswald 2015
• Friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins (media)
• "Monkey kingdom: China is positioning itself as a world leader in primate research"

Politics/religion:

• Book Review: Albion's Seed
• "Peer review: Troubled from the start"
• "My Year in San Francisco's \$2 Million Secret Society Startup"

AI:

• "Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth", Huang et al 2016 (dropout of random layers, which does not just work, but works better and enables >1200-layer residual networks. This might be related to Liao & Poggio 2016 claim that deep residual nets are effectively unrolled RNNs which apply slight variants of an algorithm to many timesteps.)
• "Generating Large Images from Latent Vectors"
• "Foveation-based Mechanisms Alleviate Adversarial Examples", Luo et al 2016
• "Convolutional Networks for Fast, Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing", Esser et al 2016

Statistics/meta-science:

• "A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook", Gordon et al 2016 (How often does correlation=causation? <50% of the time in Internet advertising, with gross over/underestimates even with detailed covariate & advanced modeling.)
• "The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism" (So Bialystok is refusing a collaboration because a pre-registered protocol is unscientific and she refuses to work with someone so 'biased' that they would damage the non-pre-registered results, and besides, publication bias doesn't exist - "there is absolutely no evidence". I see...)
• "Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery: A new study shows that peer-review scores for grant proposals are random anyway"
• "Bandit based Monte-Carlo planning", Kocsis & Szepesvári 2006
• "How Kalman Filters Work, Part 1"
• "The importance of 'gold standard' studies for consumers of research"

Psychology/biology:

• "The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments", Fryer 2016 (education; lots of small effects):
• "A Meta-Analysis of Blood Glucose Effects on Human Decision Making", Orquin & Kurzban 2016
• "Is Ego-Depletion a Replicable Effect? A Forensic Meta-Analysis of 165 Ego Depletion Articles"
• "Indoor air quality and academic performance", Stafford 2015 (apropos of harms of CO2 discussion)
• "Seven Pervasive Statistical Flaws in Cognitive Training Interventions", Moreau et al 2016
• "The Voyeur's Motel"

Technology:

• "What the game 'Werewolf' teaches us about Trust & Security"
• The Raising of Chicago

Economics:

• "Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging", Gavrilov & Gavrilova 2010
• Interview with short seller Jim Chanos (Short sellers are always so interesting. Few people are so motivated to see through the miasma of lies and bias and self-serving optimism in the business and finance world.)

On how whether grains vs. roots were eaten may have determined the success of ancient civilizations.

I've been reading livetweets of the Oracle vs Google trial by jury, presided over by Judge Alsup, who learned to code. In a previous trial, Judge Alsup had declared that the software API in question was uncopyrightable. However, his decision was overturned by the federal court, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So now they are redoing the trial with a new jury, with the premise that an API is copyrightable, in order to decide whether Google's reimplementation of a Java API from Sun at the time (later bought by Oracle) was "fair use" of copyrightable materials.

The decision in this trial has the potential to impact the future of software development. The 9 billion dollars being asked for by Oracle is actually not the biggest thing at stake in this case. It is being decided by jurors who were picked because they know very little about how software development works.

In the courtroom livetweeting the events are Sarah Jeong https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/ and Parker Higgins https://twitter.com/xor/ and a few other people, most of whom are on Sarah Jeong's list: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/lists/oracle-v-google or using the hashtag #googacle https://twitter.com/hashtag/googacle

Exurb1a is making some excellent nihilistic mind-bending. Highlights:

• Oh hello, you're alive
• 27: UFAI detection by triggers
• What is You? -a short on the nature of experiencing

100 meachine learning videos on uTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjeM1xxYb_37bZfyparLS3Q/videos

(In Russian; freely available on the 'net) Экскурсия (The Trip) by Наталья Жукова, Борис Жуков. A fic set in Middle Earth long after the end of the War of the Ring. A youngish Hobbit, gardener by trade and Gamgee by name, goes on a recreational trip and ends up sending the very last Elf home to his wife - Galadriel the Fair. Brilliantly written.

• A Life of Sir Francis Galton (review)
• On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine, Rasmussen 2008 (particularly interesting for the inside information about how early American pharmacorps & drug development worked, but much weaker past the '70s; at least, if you can get past Rasmussen's huge bias against amphetamines and blind support for the disastrous War on Drugs)

The scourge of existential nihilism has a cure

A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

http://www.amazon.com/Significant-Life-Meaning-Silent-Universe/dp/022623567X

pure philosophy inside, lots of Aristotle reasoning examined.

Also if you are at all interested in the surveillance state, and some of the legal reasoning that it may be breaking the separation of powers, the whole issue of the Monthly Review is excellent reading

The New Surveillance Normal

http://monthlyreview.org/archives/2014/volume-66-issue-03-july-august/

One of my favorites: The Knight in Rusty Armor

Some common literary tropes, but I consider it a must-read and use it as a reminder to follow the Path of Truth in my own endeavors.

• Megazone 23 (a strange relict. It's as if Macross cuckolded Streets of Fire with Akira while Miyazaki perved at the window and the Gainax boys took notes. Episode 1 in particular crosses so many genres and does so much in so little time that even non-fans of 1980s anime might find it worthwhile.)
• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro (review)

• Pirates of Silicon Valley (Bit of a '90s nostalgia trip. Awkward frame narration aside, this is one of the paradigmatic interpretation of Bill Gates & Steve Jobs from before they entered their second or third acts - Jobs when Jobs had ruined Apple but not yet saved it, Gates when Gates was widely vilified as a monotone psychopath nerd and was not yet canonized Saint Gates for devoting his fortune to Third-Worlders. Watching it, I find myself astonished yet again how Microsoft became so dominant and Bill Gates the richest man in history. How did it happen? It just doesn't seem possible, even after you read event by event descriptions. How could it be that Gates could go to IBM offering them a simple operating system, a thing that was always before then, and we can see is even now with Android and Linux and Apple, something that was relatively unimportant compared to the hardware and easily copied or surpassed, and build its empire on this? It makes no sense. But it happened anyway.)

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., S03E18: "The Singularity". Aired April 26. The team wants to find a biologist whose work they need.

Simmons: He was asked to step down a month before for conducting irregular experiments.
Lincoln: "Irregular" meaning...?
Fitz: (grimly) He's a rumored transhumanist.
Coulson (who previously collected a set of trading cards commemorating, and later worked with, a man who was biologically augmented in the 1940s; worked with and against various members of an alien civilization whose advanced magic/technology allows them to live for thousands of years; ran, tried to have shut down, and later had his life saved by an advanced research project dedicated to reviving the clinically dead; fought a Hydra faction led by a man who'd uploaded his mind to a bank of computers in the 1970s; worked closely with a biologically and technologically upgraded cyborg; and has a prosthetic arm with super strength among its features)**: A what? Simmons: People who believe in using science and technology to transcend our biological limitations. Their goal is... Lincoln: Become more than human. Timely. Fitz: Digital immortality, superintelligence... Coulson:** Okay. I'm glad everyone knows what it is.

(The episode goes on to portray "transhumanists" as sexy, stylish young people who meet in secret clubs to exchange illegal(?) enhancements. The biologist appears to enthusiastically join a villain who wants to end conflict by converting the world into his mind slaves.)

Protomen Act 2: The Father of Death - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWwGo28FdZ8 1984 and Megaman-inspired rock opera. Story of Dr. Light's quest to avenge his father's death by accident by making machines to replace dangerous work, and the theft of his work by his ambitious partner, who proceeds to conquer the world.

Starry, Starry Night (Vincent) - Don Mclean - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHnRfhDmrk Wistful and sad song on the life, work, and suicide of Vincent Van Gogh "How you suffered for your sanity"

Touhou:

• "音の瓶詰 - 河童の里" (ジャム; 守矢幻燈録 ～ Separation of Spirit {R12}) [classical]
• "Reincarnation" (Mitty; Imitation Circus {C89}) [classical]
• "Anois --" (Casket/Escarmew; 幻想パブ:午後11時23分58秒 {科学世紀のカフェテラス6}) [Celtic]
• "デザイアドライブ" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
• "古きユアンシェン" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
• "聖徳伝説 ～ True Administrator" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]
• "欲深き霊魂" (Marasy; 幻想遊戯＜神＞ ～ Museum of marasy {R12}) [classical]

I've done a few more episodes of my podcast Future Strategist. I interviewed geneticist Razib Khan who said we might get embryo selection by 2020, I read the introduction to my book Singularity Rising, I debated Vox Day (the Rabid Puppies founder) on Free Trade, I interviewed computer scientists Roman Yampolsky and we discussed the dangers of AI, and I discussed game theory in Greek Mythology. If you like my podcast please consider leaving a positive review on iTunes.

Should we, starting from next month's thread (June 2016), add a Games (or Videogames if that's a preferred name) subthread?

[pollid:1140]

If a Games subthread is added, should we remove some other subthread, and if so which?

[pollid:1141]