Short Online Texts Thread
August reading roundup; everything is heritable:
“A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?” (see “Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins”, “The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals”, & “A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”)
How harmful is smoking during pregnancy—after controlling for the sort of people who would do that?
“On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits”, Hsu 2014
“Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment
“The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes”, Tesser 1993 (excerpts)
“Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)”, Helbig 1991 (“For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.”)
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“Personal reflections on lessons learned from randomized trials involving newborn infants, 1951 to 1967”, Silverman 2003 (9 out of 10 dead babies agree: even cherished ‘obvious’ beliefs must be tested by RCTs)
“Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer”, Franco et al 2014 (Nature; Andrew Gelman; excerpts)
“Better Estimation When Perfection Is Unlikely: A Bayesian Example”
“The Lyme Wars: The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.”, “What Science Needs”
“Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine”, Hales 2013 (excerpts)
“On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments”, “Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed” (excerpts)
“Academic urban legends”, Rekdal 2014
“In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal”
Psychology:
“Metabolic costs and evolutionary implications of human brain development”, Kuzawa et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Lead exposure and behavior: effects on antisocial and risky behavior among children and adolescents”, Reyes 2014
“Bastards and Stereotype Accuracy”
“How are conscientiousness and cognitive ability related to one another? A re-examination of the intelligence compensation hypothesis”, Murray et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Investigating America’s elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences”, Wai 2013 (excerpts)
“What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?”
“Standard and trace-dose lithium: A systematic review of dementia prevention and other behavioral benefits”, Mauer et al 2014
Puppy pregnancy syndrome
Technology:
Hal Finney has died (NYT)
“The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality”
“Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule”
“Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing”, Nordhaus 2007 (excerpts)
Economics:
“Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills”, Clark 1987 (excerpts)
“How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading’s Rise and Fall”
“What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?”
Rag-picker
Politics/religion:
“The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did: Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?”
Gombe Chimpanzee War
Bedford Level experiment
“The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage”
Fiction:
2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far, but nevertheless, I would happily rewatch Azumanga Daioh, Haibane Renmei, & RahXephon any number of times, and picked up some interesting suggestions for future watching like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space.)
“The Too-Clever Fox”
TvTropes reviews Nature of Nature’s Art webcomic
Misc:
Evolution of E. Coli over 60k generations
“War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy”
“A Parable”, Dijkstra 1973 (Orienting toilets on train cars.)
Judas goat
“The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit: For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine”
The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering—Somewhat changed my view about the scale of wildlife suffering and the sentience of non-domesticated animal species
Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom - On insight porn and what kind of people LW and the related memeplex tend to attract
The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains by Anders Sanberg (1999) - paper discussing what computers up against the limits of physics might look like (skip to the end for some interesting examples)
Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom
The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-animal-suffering
Short Online Texts Thread
August reading roundup; everything is heritable:
“A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?” (see “Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins”, “The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals”, & “A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”)
How harmful is smoking during pregnancy—after controlling for the sort of people who would do that?
“On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits”, Hsu 2014
“Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (excerpts)
Smoking is heritable but not through shared environment
“The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: The Case of Attitudes”, Tesser 1993 (excerpts)
“Inheritance of migratory direction in a bird species: a cross-breeding experiment with SE- and SW-migrating blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla)”, Helbig 1991 (“For blackcap warblers, the direction of migration is clearly innate, so crossbreeding a group of blackcaps who flew south for fall migration with a group that oriented westward resulted in offspring who flew in a southwesterly direction.”)
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“Personal reflections on lessons learned from randomized trials involving newborn infants, 1951 to 1967”, Silverman 2003 (9 out of 10 dead babies agree: even cherished ‘obvious’ beliefs must be tested by RCTs)
“Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer”, Franco et al 2014 (Nature; Andrew Gelman; excerpts)
“Better Estimation When Perfection Is Unlikely: A Bayesian Example”
“The Lyme Wars: The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.”, “What Science Needs”
“Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine”, Hales 2013 (excerpts)
“On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments”, “Controlled trials: the 1948 watershed” (excerpts)
“Academic urban legends”, Rekdal 2014
“In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal”
Psychology:
“Metabolic costs and evolutionary implications of human brain development”, Kuzawa et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Lead exposure and behavior: effects on antisocial and risky behavior among children and adolescents”, Reyes 2014
“Bastards and Stereotype Accuracy”
“How are conscientiousness and cognitive ability related to one another? A re-examination of the intelligence compensation hypothesis”, Murray et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Investigating America’s elite: Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences”, Wai 2013 (excerpts)
“What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?”
“Standard and trace-dose lithium: A systematic review of dementia prevention and other behavioral benefits”, Mauer et al 2014
Puppy pregnancy syndrome
Technology:
Hal Finney has died (NYT)
“The Rise and Fall and Rise of Virtual Reality”
“Hervé This: The world’s weirdest chef; building food, molecule by molecule”
“Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing”, Nordhaus 2007 (excerpts)
Economics:
“Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills”, Clark 1987 (excerpts)
“How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading’s Rise and Fall”
“What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?”
Rag-picker
Politics/religion:
“The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did: Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?”
Gombe Chimpanzee War
Bedford Level experiment
“The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage”
Fiction:
2002 in anime (Overall, not the best year for anime by far, but nevertheless, I would happily rewatch Azumanga Daioh, Haibane Renmei, & RahXephon any number of times, and picked up some interesting suggestions for future watching like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space.)
“The Too-Clever Fox”
TvTropes reviews Nature of Nature’s Art webcomic
Misc:
Evolution of E. Coli over 60k generations
“War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy”
“A Parable”, Dijkstra 1973 (Orienting toilets on train cars.)
Judas goat
“The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit: For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine”
The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering—Somewhat changed my view about the scale of wildlife suffering and the sentience of non-domesticated animal species
Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom - On insight porn and what kind of people LW and the related memeplex tend to attract
The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains by Anders Sanberg (1999) - paper discussing what computers up against the limits of physics might look like (skip to the end for some interesting examples)
Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom
The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering
http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-animal-suffering