March 2014 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you’ve found that you enjoy. Post what you’re reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don’t personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person’s recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Short Online Texts Thread
Literature:
“William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211”
“You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes” (Nethack essay on pets; my dog died last month)
“Our Toyota was Fantastic”
Wondermark: “Better Olympic Narratives” / #1001; “In which Athletes are overgood”
“SCP-1370”
“Composer of the Month – Jun Maeda”
Medicine:
“The Nazi War on Cancer”
“IamA Anesthesia Awareness survivor!” (see also Inverse P-zombies)
“Bad Dreams”
Psychology:
“Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review”, Langlois et al 2000 (excerpts)
“Hints of genomic dark matter: rare variants contribute to schizophrenia risk”
“Xenopsychology”
“Nootropics surveys and results” (I also did a multi-level model analysis of the data)
Statistics:
Inferring XKCD topics with Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Lies, Damned Lies, And Social Media (Part 5 of ∞) (rape statistics)
Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations (I disagree on the benefits of vitamin D for all-cause mortality; see my comments)
“If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be?”
Science/technology:
“A Star in a Bottle: An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.” (ITER fusion research update; some shades of Radiance/NIF in there...)
“Geoengineering research” (Givewell)
“On the Statistics of Individual Variations of Productivity in Research Laboratories”, Shockley 1957 (discussion; see also “Age and Outstanding Achievement: What Do We Know After a Century of Research?”, Simonton 1988)
Fully Decentralized Bitcoin Prediction Markets
“The recent ‘How Quantum is the D-Wave Machine?’ Shin et al paper” (If I had D-Wave shares, I would be selling at any price.)
“Little’s Law, Scalability and Fault Tolerance: The OS is your bottleneck (and what you can do about it)” (possibly obvious notes on server scaling to anyone working on big services, but I liked the use of Little’s law to structure the discussion.)
“Another Empty, Lifeless Planet Found” (satire)
Misc:
“Don’t End The Week With Nothing” (Portfolios and working in public.)
“What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, Lewis Carroll
Politics/religion:
“The Anti-Reactionary FAQ”
Some thoughts on education and political priorities (Amazingly synoptic read from Dominic Cummings: physicists, psychometrics, education, experience curves, Fermi estimates, teaching high-IQ students, behavioral genetics—he’s got everything. LW discussion, Guardian)
“From the Okhrana to the KGB: Continuities in Russian foreign intelligence operations since the 1880s”, Andrew 1989 (excerpts)
“$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida records every expense” (Principal-agent problems—because terrorism is not about beliefs; see also “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”)
“Appendix F—Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” (Feynman’s classic appendix on the Space Shuttle program is worth a read if you’ve never gotten around to it before.)
“Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment”
“What Is the Koran? Researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests are proposing controversial theories about the Koran and Islamic history, and are striving to reinterpret Islam for the modern world. This is, as one scholar puts it, a ‘sensitive business’”
“No Safe Haven: Iran’s Global Assassination Campaign” (I look forward to their version for the USA & Israel)
“As Tanzania’s Albino Killings Continue, Unanswered Questions Raise Fears: Targeted by witch doctors and underserved by government, East African albinos face many challenges”
“What if the Tsarnaevs had been giant copper robots?”
On the recent origins of ancient traditions:
“Don’t tell the kids: The real history of the tooth fairy; She’s way younger than you’d think. And she might be descended from the Tooth Mouse” / “The tooth fairy and the traditionality of modernity”
Buddhist modernism / “A new World Religion”
“The invention of tradition (karate edition)”
Business:
“How the Fed Let the World Blow Up in 2008: High oil prices blinded the Fed to the growing danger before the crash”
“The Milkman Cometh: What did George Sperti have to do with America’s obsession with supplements? The long, winding tale of a clever young UC engineering student, a nation fighting rickets, and a little money-maker called vitamin D.” (rise and fall of the Vitamin D cartel)
“What Bad Students Know that Good Economists Don’t” (I’ve been remarking for the past two years or so that we should find it very odd that the college wage premium keeps going up even as graduation rates stagnate; I’m glad Caplan has been looking at the problem.)
Krugman, “The Fall and Rise of Development Economics” (1995).
My summary:
I’ve been finding a lot of things I enjoy reading on Medium, but I particularly recommend https://medium.com/geek-empire/adee12852e02 - about death in Fire Emblem, and how an interactive medium allows a more, well, realistic approach to the topic.
A rationalist studying Chinese in China
Not a bad writeup but I think he’s being really premature on some of his assessments like the racism and xenophobia. Those are things that a tourist (and he still is a tourist, after 2 weeks) may not be exposed to immediately. The stereotypes are being reported by people who generally have been there a lot longer and have had more opportunities to learn about things like gossip behind their backs, glass ceilings, how they’re treated in rare circumstances like emergencies, etc.
It looked to me as though he’d been warned that just being in China for a visit would be unpleasant because he’d be disliked on sight, and that turned out not to be true.
Why do you think he’s a rationalist?
Bradshaw et al. - The Seven Deadly Myths of Autonomous Systems.
Colwell, Books Engineers Should Read.
Motoyama et al—The National Nanotechnology Initiative, federal support for science and technology, or hidden industrial policy.
Choosing a strictly proper scoring rule.
Podcasts Thread
Online Videos Thread
Fanfiction Thread
I feel like this must have been recommended before, but if so I couldn’t find where, and it has just recently been updated after a longish pause. I just recently read through what there is so far of Lighting Up the Dark. I wasn’t familiar with Naruto, but I was generally able to follow it, and I liked some of the humor (which seemed to be poking fun at anime generally, rather than being specific to Naruto). It was inspired by an omake chapter in HPMOR (which is why I thought it would have been mentioned around here at some point), and presents a fairly interesting, rationality-upgraded Naruto.
It has been mentioned previously on /r/rational, but I don’t think here.
Nonfiction Books Thread
I read “Quantum Computing Since Democritus” by Scott Aaronson and loved it but can only hesitantly recommend it. I think I got significantly more utility out of it than most would as I happened to hit the “sweet spot” for being sufficiently equipped to not be hindered by its (clearly marked and understandable) omissions while still having enough gaping holes in my knowledge that I got a lot out of it. For the record, my background is in math with one course in quantum mechanics, one in intro course in quantum computation and no training in complexity classes.
I have never had as much fun with a book this technical before. Please take that as a challenge and recommend me some competitors!
It covers a huge range of material in a very light and enjoyable manner—I frequently found myself laughing out loud. His exercises were, for me, impressively at the level of being just hard enough that they look ridiculously challenging (in one case, apparently impossible!) at first read over but still having an approachable solution after five minutes of thought. He goes over many things that are directly interesting to this community (the anthropic principle, self-identification assumption, Newcomb’s problem, even time travel) and even though I have already read up on those a significant amount found a lot of good stuff in those sections where he does actually manage to relate it to quantum computation.
This is not a traditional book on quantum computing and its title is perhaps misleading. It really is about computational complexity. You will not learn Shor’s algorithm for factoring numbers and Aaronson gives only a slight overview of, for example, what quantum gates do. Prior knowledge of this would be helpful but you could still get something out of it. Don’t expect to learn this or you will be disappointed. The computational complexity material is however first rate.
It’s based off of freely available lecture notes from his website under the same name. I enjoyed this book enough that I like owning a physical copy, but you could probably read it online without much loss. The main difference is some updates for results that came out since the course was originally held (which are valuable). In some sense, I suspect that the online lecture notes are margnially better—for example the book doesn’t have colored diagrams even though the text in at least one case refers to colors on the diagram.
Drexler’s Nanosystems is very technical and very fun. The first ~half of the book is interesting physics, and the rest is mind-blowing systems design (molecular manufacturing and nanomechanical computers!).
Great—added to my reading list!
Fiction Books Thread
I read The Martian based off the recommendation here, and found it… okay. (Reporting negative results is important too, right?) It was distinctly less affecting than Gravity (movie), Rocket Girls (or its sequel, or the same author’s Usurper of the Sun), or Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth (nonfiction), all of which I recommend to fans of the subject matter.
I recommended it, and I am glad for your report! FWIW, I liked it more than Gravity, in part because it was less emotionally affecting.
I also read it based on your recommendation (I think—don’t remember clearly) and I really really liked it. The near-future science is overwhelmingly convincing in a good way. What’s funny is that I thought the characters were pretty shallow and the constantly peppy attitude of the hero not believable and somewhat grating; usually the quality of characters and their development is a must for me, their shallowness ruins any book. Somehow it didn’t happen here. There was just so much of this juicy mind-opening fascinating engaging sciency stuff that kept me at the edge of the chair. I’m really glad I read this book—thanks!
Like Anatoly, I also really liked the book. It’s not very deep in my mind, but it’s just good ol’ fashioned fun, for the kind of people who love hearing of highly technical matters (about which they honestly know little, at least in my case).
Fiction:
Absolute Sandman, vol III, IV
Radiance (review)
Brosh 2013′s Hyperbole and a Half (review)
Television and Movies Thread
True Detective on HBO is fantastic. Matthew McConnaughey’s and Woody Harrelson’s performances alone are worth the price of admission. There’s an all-time-great long action scene, lots of philosophizing in a Schopenhauer/Nietzsche direction, references to classic weird fiction, and gorgeous scenery-porn of rural degradation.
Intelligence) is an action series about a noble and handsome intelligence agent with a brain-augmenting microchip running around saving people and the world, with the help of his beautiful and capable female sidekick (well, bodyguard). Yes, it’s that cheesy. It also has a 24-style conservative bend and is full of plot holes. However, the acting is good, the chemistry between main characters is excellent, and the pace is fast enough to avoid boredom. Amazingly, the show manages to touch on many transhumanist ideas, although “touch” is probably not the right term. “Rape them”, more like. X-risks, what it means to be human, unpredictable effects of brain augmentation, intelligence explosion, gray goo, you name it. I think the main positive effect of the show is that it brings the transhumanist ideas to the mainstream viewers, so they are no longer seen as something only wacko singulatarians talk about.
I’ve been watching this show as well and agree with your review. What I find most distracting though isn’t the plot holes or mistreatment of various transhumanist ideas, but just constantly thinking “why the hell is a unique, multi-billion-dollar, supercomputer-augmented agent running around getting into fistfights and gunfights with just one sidekick/bodyguard instead of having a full tactical team protecting him at all times.” If someone could tell me a good “reason” for this, I think I’d be able to enjoy the show a lot more. :-)
Actually, a unique person with a chip like that would not be let out of the lab. Mycroft more than Sherlock. The reason for him being a field agent is, of course, that it makes the show more exciting. Similarly, any chip like that would be built with external access by the handlers, so it can be debugged, updated and disabled if necessary.
Film:
All Is Lost: if the WP description of a 1.5 hour dialogue-less film about a small-boat disaster & survival sounds like something you’d enjoy, you probably will; Redford does an excellent job and it is interesting to watch his character think & improvise and try to master the situations he finds himself in
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: not nearly as awful and sentimental tripe as one would expect given the setting of a retirement home in India, and particularly interesting for depicting some of the struggles elderly people experience these days (not something I see much of).
Anime:
Silver Spoon
Uchouten Kazoku
Genshiken Nidaime (review)
Iblard Time
I am greatly enjoying Super Sonico The Animation. I expect approximately no-one to agree with me. I like the lead whose personality has enough contradictory elements—and whose approach to live is passive enough—to seem like a real person. I like the mundane optimism of the plot—life goes on, nothing particularly special happens, but the little things make people happy. I like the absurdity that permeates every episode but rarely quite bubbles over.
Given the general reception for this show, I only feel confident recommending it to people who liked Busou Shinki Moon Angel.
Music Thread
I am doing a Youtube playlist of transhumanist songs (with a particular quote from each song). Since there’s not a lot of these, I also put songs that are only somewhat transhumanist (frankly I’m shocked at the ratio of transhumanist songs to love songs). So do you have suggestions for songs that are somewhat related to transhumanism (and/or rationality) (not necessarily in English) please?
For example, here are the ones that I have put in the playlist so far:
Turn It Around by Tim McMorris
Another one is Hiro by Soprano: a song about someone who’s saying what he would do if he could travel back in time. (it’s in French but with English subtitles) (it’s inspired from the TV show Heroes which I also recommend).
The classic Imagine by John Lennon
The Future Soon by Jonathan Coulton
One that I saw recommended on LW: The Singularity by Dr. Steel (it’s my favorite!)
Another that I saw on LW: Singularity by The Lisps
Singularity by Steve Aoki & Angger Dimas ft. My Name is Kay
I am the very model of a singularitarian
Another World by Doug Bard
Transhuman by Neurotech
Transhuman by Amaranthe
E.T. by Katy Perry ft. Kanye West
Space Girl by Charmax
In this writup of the 2013 Boston winter solstice celebration, there is a list of songs sung there. I would suggest this as a primary resource for populating your list.
I’ve been writing up a pile of Wikipedia articles related to the Neue Deutsche Welle electronic band Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft—so far I’ve done Robert Görl, Gabi Delgado-López and Chrislo Haas—so now I need to play the records again before writing those up. Surprising just how much you can achieve with only a drum machine, a synthetic bassline and a voice.
East Asian metal.
Esthete Sinistre—The best metal band I’ve heard—it’s too bad they’ve only ever recorded one track.
Ego Fall—folk metal from Inner Mongolia. (see also)
Kanashimi—Japanese depressive black metal. With a piano.
Pyha—Korean black metal. Pyha is mostly known for The Haunted House, which the guy apparently recorded when he was 14, but he has another album, Majbulnol-i, which deserves at least as much recognition, and which I’d call ‘blues metal’ if that didn’t sound ridiculous.
Tengger Cavalry—Mongolian folk metal.
The Nine Treasures—More Mongolian folk metal.
There’s also Altan Urag, a Mongolian folk rock band, not to be confused with the Irish folk band Altan. (The word ‘altan’ means ‘stream’ in Irish Gaelic and ‘golden’ in Mongolian.)
Touhou:
“真生未分の一心” (spctrm; Duende {C80}) [orchestral/folk]
“eureka” (hiro.na; eureka {C77}) [folk/inst rock]
“avatar” (綾倉盟; eureka {C77}) [instrumental/electronic]
“a field of clouds” (hiro.na; eureka {C77}) [instrumental]
“Dreaming Tonight” feat. Renko (Kirin; Starlight {C85}) [trance]
“Floral Colors” feat. 陽花 (Tim Vegas; Nothing but Flowers {C80}) [Jpop/trance]
Doujin:
“The Moonstone” (pluginpsyche; wait for multiple memories {C84}) [instrumental]
“Before My Life Ends” (pluginpsyche; wait for multiple memories {C84}) [instrumental]
“聖餐唱曲およびレチタティーヴォ (Eucharist Cantata and Recitative)” (綾野えいり; 蓋然性進化論Ⅱ 2013) [classical vocal]
“或る吟遊詩人の憧憬” (霜月はるか; canoueII~最果ての塔~ 2013) [classical vocal]
“Look up in the Sky” feat. mow*2 (P*Light; HARDCORE UNITED TOKYO {C84}) [hardcore]
“TOKONATSU” (P*light; SUPER SONIC !! {C84}) [hardcore]
“Bring the Sun” (fang; Driven’ De:st-ructure3 {C84}) [hardcore]
“Walking” (fang; Driven’ De:st-ructure3 {C84}) [hardcore]
“Rhythm Of Love” feat. Yuki (M-Project; Blood, Sweat & Makina {C84}) [techno]
“Are You Ready (DJ SHIMAMURA Remix)” feat. Yukacco (kors k; HARDCORE UNITED TOKYO {C84}) [hardcore]
Vocaloid:
“Inverse Relation” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]
“Reverberations” (Miku; Clean Tears; Reverberations {C84}) [trance]
“こどものしくみ” (Miku; by 鹿乃; 或る街の白昼夢 {C85}) [Jpop]
“パンデミックの掃除” (Rin; かがみね★ふぇすた 2013) [JPop]
“mugs” (古川本舗 & 630; Alice in wonderword) [rock]
“Alice” (Meiko; Alice in wonderword) [Jpop?]
“ピアノ・レッスン” (野宮真貴 with Baguettes Ensemble; Alice in wonderword) [jazz]
Misc:
“Pulstar” (Vangelis; Albedo 0.39) [electronic]
“Heaven & Hell, Pt. 1” (Vangelis; The Music of Cosmos) [classical]
Other Media Thread
Meta Thread