Links for Jan-Mar 2018

Quarterly Links present my most important reading in the last 3 months. I aim for timelessness, conciseness, and delta.

Note: I do not endorse anything in links below.

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Jan

On literature pollution and cottage-industry science: “but our lab only has resources for small n studies” is not a good excuse to publish shit

Different Worlds: nothing makes sense, except in light of individual variation, part n out of ∞

Moore’s Law and AGI Timelines: AGI most likely by late 2050s

Open-endedness: The last grand challenge you’ve never heard of: ML on “open-ended” problems is underexplored

In Understanding Business Fluctuations Not all GDP is Equal: shocks to different industries have different impact on GDP, thus the structure of the production can’t be ignored in macro

Dwelling in Possibility: the ability to hold the belief that everything is horrible and it doesn’t matter we will still win simultaneously is pretty important

Longevity FAQ: A beginner’s guide to longevity research

Theory of Change: if you have a goal in mind, move backwards step by step from it to see how to reach it

20 of my [Spencer Greenberg’s] all time favorite life hacks

Re: How do species evolve different numbers of chromosomes?: by inbreeding

The Strangeness of the Modern Mind: modern habits of mind (Universalism, Abstraction, Commensurability) are recent and far from being universal

Poll: Do you have a life mission?: 34% Yes; 31% No; 12% Used to; 23% Hope to

New Evidence on the Impacts of Birth Order: later-born children have worse general outcomes

“I think you fail to understand who is actually in charge of large companies."

Feb

The network nonsense of Albert-László Barabási: apparently a dude with h-index of 125 publishes mostly trivialities and nonsense (on networks)

What are the Laws of Biology?: “Most of what we do in biology and much of what we teach is describing what’s happening – not what a system is doing.”

Intelligent Lifespans: “As a rough rule of thumb, those of IQ 115 live 10 years longer than those of IQ 85.”

The importance of awareness for understanding language: “across 10 high-powered studies, we found no evidence that the meaning of a phrase or word could be understood without awareness”

“the unfortunate fuzziness of rape statistics”: nobody really knows the proportion of rape allegations that are sound

The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers: Uber male drivers drive faster than female drivers, thus earn more

Heritability of Social Behavioral Phenotypes (picture): (publication)

Evolution doesn’t give a damn what you think a brain region is called

Will truckers be automated? (from the comments): not soon

Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn’t Work Yet

“figuring out a trait is highly heritable does not imply much about how that heritability comes about - whether it’s through an interaction with a social environment, interaction with environments created by the genes of those related to us”

The Song Dynasty’s Surrender: finale of an extremely interesting series on the history of China

Mar

“I would like to also provide some excerpts from The black quota at Yale Law School”

Embryo Selection for Intelligence …works

The David Attenborough Style of Scientific Presentation: explicitly try to make any presentation as fun as possible

The emergence of the visual word form: Longitudinal evolution of category-specific ventral visual areas during reading acquisition: support for neuronal recycling

“What’s the most absurd/invasive thing that tech platforms do or have done that sounds made-up but is actually true?"

“At what point we can say that Britain has systemic problem with protection of poor white girls?"

Cells are very fast and crowded places: insides of cells work largely probabilistically, not deterministically

Persistence and resistance as complementary bacterial adaptations to antibiotics

Median income earned by cognitive class: longitudinal differences in income by IQ

Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them

A Review of “The Case Against Education”: signaling theory of education is not trivially true; also, you should continue to heavily discount everything written by Bryan Caplan

Can Electrically Stimulating Your Brain Make You Too Happy?: humans, just like rats, will keep pressing the button

Humans Sleep (Way) Less Than Other Primates

Naked mole rats defy the biological law of aging: i.e. their death probability distribution is uniform over time

Somewhere Inside, a Path to Empathy: asperger’s and marriage

Tinbergen’s Four Questions: prerequisites for understanding any evolved behavior

Gender-segregated occupations in Norway and the U.S are correlated

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Thin-Skin In The Game

The relationship between sensory processing, childhood rituals and obsessive–compulsive symptoms …is positive

See all Quarterly Links here.


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