Links

Genetics:

• Everything Is Heritable:

  • “Efficient polygenic risk scores for biobank scale data by exploiting phenotypes from inferred relatives”, Truong et al 2020 (PGSes are not optimal for pure predictive power; BLUP/mixed-models greatly outperform them; see Gianola & Rosa2015)

  • “Germline mutation rates in young adults predict longevity and reproductive lifespan”, Cawthon et al 2020

  • Sequence everyone: “Whole-genome sequencing of rare disease patients in a national healthcare system”, Ouwehand et al 2020; “Genomic analyses implicate noncoding de novo variants in congenital heart disease”, Richter et al 2020; “Genetic ancestry analysis on >93,000 individuals undergoing expanded carrier screening reveals limitations of ethnicity-based medical guidelines”, Kaseniit2020; “An integrated polygenic and clinical risk tool enhances coronary artery disease prediction”, Aguilera et al 2020

• Recent Evolution:

  • “Evidence of Polygenic Adaptation in Sardinia at Height-Associated Loci Ascertained from the Biobank Japan”, Chen et al 2020

• Engineering:

  • Successful treatment of Beta Thalassemia & Sickle Cell Anemia in humans with CRISPR

  • “Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Polygenic Disease Relative Risk Reduction: Evaluation of Genomic Index Performance in 11,883 Adult Sibling Pairs”, Treff et al 2020 (previously: Karavani et al 2019 & Treff et al 2019; while I have concluded that transhumanists need not be interested in embryo selection because it will not be causing major societal changes in the next decade or two compared to the much more rapid progress in AI & it increasingly looks like more powerful paradigms will arrive too late to matter, it is still happening)

  • “A Year In, 1^st Patient To Get CRISPR Gene-Editing For Sickle Cell Disease Is Thriving”

AI:

• “Image Augmentations for GAN Training”, Zhao et al 2020b; Tran et al 2020; Karras et al 2020; Zhao et al 2020c¹ (Commentary—correct data augmentation for GANs: surprisingly simple & effective, and invented simultaneously 4 times in the past month; see also Zhao et al 2020a.)

• “SBR: Learning to Play No-Press Diplomacy with Best Response Policy Iteration”, Anthony et al 2020 (natural language Diplomacy agents surely can’t be too much more difficult given NLM progress…)

• “Exploration Strategies in Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Lilian Weng

• Matters Of Scale:

  • “OpenAI API” (GPT-3-as-a-service: demos; eg. code writing video)

  • “GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding”, Lepikhin et al 2020

    Training a 600b-parameter NN translation model for 100 languages; +13.5 BLEU; training 1t-parameter models already tested. Note that while 600b is impressive, as a mixture of experts (MoE), it is more like thousands of much smaller highly-redundant models pasted together—this has great performance advantages in training & querying, but means it is more analogous to a regular NMT model with, say, 60b-parameters rather than 600b.

  • iGPT: Chen et al 2020

    Literally GPT-2 but for 64px images—simply train a big Transformer to predict the next pixel, and it catches up with the fancier semi-supervised methods like SimCLR. This eschews any metric learning or bootstrapping or non-quadratic attention mechanisms like Sparse Transformers, but with enough compute still works… “Attention is all you need”? The new efficient attentions may break the quadratic bottleneck limiting current uses.

  • “Bajic, and other chip teams, are responding to…neural net models that Bajic said he couldn’t talk about publicly that will have on the order of one-trillion parameters.”

  • 2018 AI budgets: OpenAI: ~$51m ($31m cloud compute); DeepMind: ~$700m²

  • “How big should my language model be?”, Huggingface2020

Politics/religion:

• Fads: “Accelerating dynamics of collective attention”, Lorenz-Spreen et al 2019 (the issue-attention cycle speeds up? See also “The universal decay of collective memory and attention”, Candia et al 2019)

• “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe 1970 (previously: “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”)

• “Agenda Seeding: How1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”, Wasow2020

• “The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition”, Hassner2020

• “Breast-Feeding of Animals by Women: Its Socio-Cultural Context and Geographic Occurrence”, Simoons & Baldwin1982 (from “Did Breast-Feeding Play A Role In the Evolution of Pets?” via “Animal Ethics and Evolutionary Psychology—10 ideas”)

• “Incest Laws and Absent Taboos in Roman Egypt”, Strong2005

Psychology/biology:

• “The Curse of Konzo: In 1981, an international group of doctors identified the devastating disease behind a perplexing outbreak of paralysis in northern Mozambique” (the investigation of cyanide poisoning by, among others, Hans Rosling)

• Scintillating scotoma (‘typical mind fallacy’ examples: 1% of the population has occasional hour-long visual blindness/hallucination for no particular reason)

• “Why Humans Totally Freak Out When They Get Lost: People really do circle past the same tree over and over again—it doesn’t just happen in movies” (why redirected walking works—we’re not good at this)

• “Increased weight loading reduces body weight and body fat in obese subjects—A proof of concept randomized clinical trial”, Ohlsson et al 2020 (the rodent ‘gravitostat’ replicates in humans with weight vests? previously: Jansson et al 2018/Ohlsson et al 2018/Ohlsson & Jansson2018/Palsdottir et al 2019. This raises so many questions if it’s really real: which bones? Can we use springs on our legs instead? Do standing desks help? What about acute stresses like squatting, or just holding, say, 140kg on our shoulders for 5 minutes? How simple is the chemical signaling of bone stress? Are the receptors druggable?)

• “Human postprandial responses to food and potential for precision nutrition”, Berry et al 2020

• “Fast food outlets, physical activity facilities, and obesity among adults: a nationwide longitudinal study from Sweden”, Okuyama et al 2020; “Association Between Lottery Prize Size and Self-reported Health Habits in Swedish Lottery Players”, Östling et al 2020 (population registries: where correlations go to die—note that the lottery gets much more precise & near-zero causal effect estimates than previous work, exemplifying the iron & stainless steel laws)

• “Health Recommendations and Selection in Health Behaviors”, Oster2020 (self-fulfilling prophecies in nutrition/diet)

• Johan Bjorksten’s cross-linkage theory of aging research (predecessors to LysoSENS) (“one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”)

• “On the Potential of Silicon as a Building Block for Life”, Petkowski et al 2020 (generally infeasible except possibly in a sulfuric acid environment)

Technology:

• “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”, Clay Shirky 2003/2005

• METAFONT: “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, Knuth 1982

• “The Monotype 4-Line System for Setting Mathematics”, Rhatigan2007 (the Monotype system brought the black art of boiling lead & mathematical typesetting to perfection just in time to be obsoleted by computers—famously spurring Knuth to invent T_eX, eventually giving academia the omnipresent look of LaTeX; see also The Printing of Mathematics)

• “Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving”, Avik Das (explanation of Avidan & Shamir2007’s seam carving, a fun & simple image editing trick exploiting dynamic programming)

• “The Incredible Story of the U.S. Army’s Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains” (the 174-meter-long TC-497 Overland Train Mark II, designed for building the Arctic DEW, could haul 150 tons >640km; its predecessor, the VC-22 Sno-Freighter was designed & built in a month)

• “When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery”

Economics:

• “Automation As Colonization Wave”

Philosophy:

• “Schrödinger’s Zombie: Adam Brown” (the quantum bomb tester can ‘photograph’ objects & ‘run’ computers to compute counterfactually without any interaction; what if instead you use a simulation or a real brain? Keith Bowden suggests it could test whether you have a quantum soul.)

Books

Nonfiction:

• The Printing of Mathematics, Chaundy et al 1954

Music

Misc:

• “Pumped Up Kicks” (Hildegard Von Blingin’ {2020}) [folk]