This is the September and October 2021 issue of the SubCriticalAppraisal Newsletter (archives).

Programming note: as it is demotivating to play catch-up, I’ve elected to combine the two month’s worth of links in this issue so I can return to the regular schedule in November. This also means this issue is double the normal length. Enjoy.

Feel free to email me with any and all suggestions or feedback. Without further ado:

1. Writings
2. Links
   1. Medicine
   2. COVID
   3. Biology
   4. Physics/Computer Science
   5. Statistics/Meta-Science
   6. Psychology
   7. Politics/Religion
   8. Technology
   9. Economics/Business/Finance
   10. Philosophy/EA
   11. Fiction
   12. Miscellaneous

Writings

• Nothing completed

Links

Medicine

Therapeutics:

• Lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery, Hou et al. 2021:
• Mental Health Therapy as a Core Strategy for Increasing Human Capital: Evidence from Ghana, Barker et al. 2021
• The Effect of Resistance Training in Healthy Adults on Body Fat Percentage, Fat Mass and Visceral Fat: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Wewege et al. 2021: compared to control, resistance training reduced body fat percentage by -1.46%; body fat mass by -0.55 kg; visceral fat by a standardised mean difference of -0.49
• C9orf72 suppresses systemic and neural inflammation induced by gut bacteria, Burberry et al. 2020: gut microflora can modify neural inflammation in patients with the most common genetic form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD)
• Recent advances in neural dust: towards a neural interface platform, Neely et al. 2018, and Neural dust swept up in latest leap for bioelectronic medicine (wiki)
• Interpretation of the evidence for the efficacy and safety of statin therapy, Collins et al. 2016: statin therapy reduces the risk of major vascular events by about ¼ for each mmol/L reduction in LDL cholesterol during each year (after the first) that it continues to be taken

Meta-medicine:

• Clinician Conceptualization of the Benefits of Treatments for Individual Patients, Morgan et al. 2021: 60-70% of clinicians overestimated benefit of treatment; median estimated chance that warfarin would prevent a stroke in the next year was 50% vs absolute risk reduction of 0.2-1.0% (relative risk reduction 39-50%); that antihypertensive therapy would prevent a cardiovascular event within 5 years was 30% vs ARR of 0-3% (RRR 0-28%); that bisphosphonate therapy would prevent a hip fracture in the next 5 years was 40% ARR of 0.1-0.4% (RRR 20-40%); that moderate-intensity statin therapy would prevent a cardiovascular event in the next 5 years was 20% vs ARR of 0.3-2% (RRR 19-33%)
• Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions? Part 1: Ways to make an impact, and why we are not there yet, and Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions? Part 2: a discussion of chemical and biological data, Bender et al. 2021: in vitro proxy data simply cannot translate into any in vivo endpoints relevant to drug safety and efficacy; most of the time we don’t understand biology well enough to even know what we need to measure
• Every gene can (and possibly will) be associated with cancer, Magalhães 2021: literally everything in genetics is associated with cancer
• The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases on the apparent efficacy of treatments: the case of depression, Vries et al. 2018:
• Re: Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US, Shojania 2016: the oft-repeated (almost 1,400 citations) finding is wrong, produced with dubious methodology (no explanation on how “point estimates” were obtained or how 2-digit deaths related to medical errors were extrapolated to all US hospitalizations to claim that ⅔ of deaths were caused by medical errors), could be overestimated by 10x, related: Prevalence, severity, and nature of preventable patient harm across medical care settings: systematic review and meta-analysis, Panagioti et al. 2019: relate pooled prevalence for preventable patient harm was 6%
• Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy, Turner et al. 2008: 31% of FDA-registered studies were never published; 94% of published trials appeared positive but FDA analysis found only 51% to be positive
• Disclosure of true diagnosis in Japanese cancer patients, Hosaka et al. 1999: 70% of cancer patients in Japan were not fully informed of their condition, but in fact concealing the true diagnosis had no effect on psychiatric disorder prevalence

Epidemiology:

• Cognitive and Neuroplasticity Mechanisms by Which Congenital or Early Blindness May Confer a Protective Effect Against Schizophrenia, Silverstein et al. 2013, and Is Early Blindness Protective of Psychosis or Are We Turning a Blind Eye to the Lack of Statistical Power? Jefsen et al. 2020
• Is marijuana really a gateway drug? A nationally representative test of the marijuana gateway hypothesis using a propensity score matching design, Jorgensen et al. 2021: it’s not
• Prevalence of diabetes recorded in mainland China using 2018 diagnostic criteria from the American Diabetes Association: national cross sectional study, Li et al. 2020: weighted prevalence of total diabetes was 12.8%(!), self-reported diabetes 6.0%, newly-diagnosed 6.8%, prediabetes 35.2%(!)
• Tobacco smoking and all-cause mortality in a large Australian cohort study: findings from a mature epidemic with current low smoking prevalence, Banks et al. 2015: ⅔ of deaths in current smokers can be attributed to smoking; current smokers estimated to die an average of 10 years earlier than non-smokers
• Association between alcohol and cardiovascular disease: Mendelian randomisation analysis based on individual participant data, Holmes et al. 2014: carriers of the A-allele of ADH1B rs1229984 consumed 17% fewer units of alcohol per week, lower odds of coronary heart disease (odds ratio 0.90) i.e. there is no safe/good amount of alcohol consumption

In a mad world, all blogging are psychiatry blogging:

• Therapygenetic effects of 5-HTTLPR on cognitive-behavioral therapy in anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis, Schiele et al. 2021: no evidence for 5-HTTLPR as a moderator of treatment outcome for CBT in anxiety disorders
• Translational opportunities for circuit-based social neuroscience: advancing 21st century psychiatry, Ford et al. 2021

Miscellaneous:

• Novel insights into the electrophysiology of murine cardiac macrophages: relevance of voltage-gated potassium channels, Simon-Chica et al. 2021
• Kidney Transplant Chains Amplify Benefit of Nondirected Donors, Melcher et al. 2013: nondirect donors trigger almost 5 transplants on average via nonsimultaneous transplant chains, more if the NDD is blood type O
• Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and His Contributions to the Foundation and Birth of Translational Medicine, Valent et al. 2016: discovered arsphenamine (the first effective cure for syphilis), invented and coined chemotherapy, invented Gram staining’s precursor that founded modern haematology, standardized antiserum and vaccination protocols, articulated side-chain (receptor-ligand) theory that founded modern immunology, articulated magic bullet theory that led to modern preclinical drug screening and targeted drug development
• Gustatory Audition; A Hitherto Undescribed Variety of Synæsthesia, Pierce 1907: self-reported sensory “taste” experiences evoked by hearing specific words, names, or sound… in a patient who can’t smell
• PsychonautWiki

COVID

• Engineering SARS-CoV-2 using a reverse genetic system, Xie et al. 2021: should it have ever been published?
• Virus-induced senescence is a driver and therapeutic target in COVID-19, Lee et al. 2021
• Post-covid syndrome in individuals admitted to hospital with covid-19: retrospective cohort study, Ayoubkhani et al. 2021: over 140 days, post-covid patients were admitted 4x greater than control, died 8x greater than control
• How did we get here: what are droplets and aerosols and how far do they go? A historical perspective on the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases, Randall et al. 2021
• A farewell to R: time-series models for tracking and forecasting epidemics, Harvey et al. 2021

Biology

Molecular Biology:

• Time-tagged ticker tapes for intracellular recordings, Lin et al. 2021
• Programmable RNA targeting with the single-protein CRISPR effector Cas7-11, Özcan et al. 2021
• The widespread IS200/IS605 transposon family encodes diverse programmable RNA-guided endonucleases, Altae-Tran et al. 2021
• Precise genomic deletions using paired prime editing, Choi et al. 2021
• Geometric deep learning of RNA structure, Townshend et al. 2021: 4.8 Å RMSD vs 7.7 Å RMSD of the second-most accurate model produced by Rosetta; trained with only 18 known RNA structures(!)
• A DNA repair pathway can regulate transcriptional noise to promote cell fate transitions, Desai et al. 2021
• Massively parallel kinetic profiling of natural and engineered CRISPR nucleases, Jones et al. 2020
• Expanding the Toolbox and Targets for Gene Editing, Dan et al. 2021
• Spatiotemporal Control of Intracellular Phase Transitions Using Light-Activated optoDroplets, Shin et al. 2016
• scRNA-tools database of tools of analysing single-cell RNA sequencing data, and Tools and techniques for single-cell RNA sequencing data, Zappia 2021: more people should publish their theses in html

Genetics:

• Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies, Polderman et al. 2021: the reported heritability across all traits in 14 million twin pairs across 39 different countries is 49%; for 69% of traits the twin correlation is solely due to additive genetic variation and not shared environment.
• A meta-analysis of height in 4.1 million European-ancestry individuals identifies ~10,000 SNPs accounting for nearly all heritability attributable to common variants, Yengo et al. 2021: polygenic score of 40%
• Heritability enrichment of specifically expressed genes identifies disease-relevant tissues and cell types, Finucane et al. 2018
• Genomic Findings on Human Behavior and Social Outcomes: FAQs

Neuroscience:

• Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep, Konkoly et al. 2021
• A rapid and efficient learning rule for biological neural circuits, Sezener et al. 2021: Dendritic Gated Network (interneurons target dendrites to shape neuronal response) as a biologically-plausible alternative to backpropagation in synaptic weight changes
• Architectures of neuronal circuits, Luo et al. 2021
• General dimensions of human brain morphometry inferred from genome-wide association data, Fürtjes et al. 2021
• What can astrocytes compute?, Peteron 2021: theoretically astrocytes can compute anything neurons can, the major limitation being astrocytes’ computational complexity
• Prefrontal connectomics: from anatomy to human imaging, Haber et al. 2021
• The chemical brain hypothesis for the origin of nervous systems, Jékely 2021
• Reafference and the origin of the self in early nervous system evolution, Jékely et al. 2021
• Modularity and neural coding from a brainstem synaptic wiring diagram, Vishwanathan et al. 2020
• Deep Reinforcement Learning and Its Neuroscientific Implications, Botvinick et al. 2020
• Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside, Cesario et al. 2020: the belief that “newer” brain structures were added to “older” brain structures and that newer structures endowed more complex psychological functions, has long been discredited, in fact brain complexity and sophisticated cognition have evolved independently many times; the cortex may even predate vertebrates; all mammals have a prefrontal cortex
• NIH’s Brain Initiative Cell Census Network: first installment of the endeavor to create the Rosetta stone of the brain is now complete, with the comprehensive mapping of mammalian primary motor cortical cell type identities on a molecular level

Longevity:

• Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans, Fahy et al. 2021
• Ultra-cheap and scalable epigenetic age predictions with TIME-Seq, Griffin et al. 2021
• Single cell analysis of the aging hypothalamus, Hajdarovic et al. 2021
• Beneficial and Detrimental Effects of Reactive Oxygen Species on Lifespan: A Comprehensive Review of Comparative and Experimental Studies, Shields et al. 2021: ROS actually increases lifespan in some short-living species; biggest limitation is that ROS still cannot be measured in vivo
• Transposon-triggered innate immune response confers cancer resistance to the blind mole rat, Zhao et al. 2021
• Age-related diseases as vicious cycles, Belikov 2020
• The Nature of Programmed Cell Death, Durand et al. 2019: PCD defined as ​​an adaptation to abiotic or biotic environmental stresses resulting in the death of the cell
• Systems Biology of Human Aging - Network Model:

Bioengineering

• A comprehensive library of human transcription factors for cell fate engineering, Ng et al. 2020
• Anticipation: Beyond synthetic biology and cognitive robotics, Nasuto et al. 2016

Miscellaneous:

• A new view of the tree of life, Hug et al. 2021:
• The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes, Xia et al. 2021: selection for the loss of tail has an adaptive cost of higher risk of neural tube defects
• Bioelectrical approaches to cancer as a problem of the scaling of the cellular self, Levin 2021
• Monkey Plays Pac-Man with Compositional Strategies and Hierarchical Decision-making, Yang et al. 2021
• The biomass distribution on Earth, Bar-On et al. 2018
• Cultural traditions and the evolution of reproductive isolation: ecological speciation in killer whales?, Riesch et al. 2012
• Common mechanisms of synaptic plasticity in vertebrates and invertebrates, Glanzman 2010
• The Primary Cilium: An Orphan Organelle Finds A Home, Adams 2010

Physics/Computer Science

• Grabby Aliens by Robin Hanson (paper)
• Related: How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-Dimensional Cosmic Haystack, Wright et al. 2018
• Bilayer Wigner crystals in a transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructure, Zhou et al. 2021, and Signatures of Wigner crystal of electrons in a monolayer semiconductor, Smoleński et al. 2021: first electron crystals created
• Galactic rotation curve and dark matter according to gravitomagnetism, Ludwig 2021: the effects attributed to dark matter can be simply explained by the gravitomagnetic field produced by the mass currents
• New Relativistic Theory for Modified Newtonian Dynamics, Skordis et al. 2021: an extension of MOND theory that doesn’t require dark matter matches observations from the CMB
• What is the Gravitational Field of a Mass in a Spatially Nonlocal Quantum Superposition?, Ligez et al. 2021
• Resolving the gravitational redshift within a millimeter atomic sample, Bothwell et al. 2021: fractional frequency measurement uncertainty improved by more than 10x
• On the Origin of Quantum Uncertainty, Adami 2020
• Constructing Turing complete Euler flows in dimension 3, Cardona et al. 2021: fluid flows are Turing-complete
• The Complexity of Gradient Descent: CLS = PPAD ∩ PLS, Fearnley et al. 2020: gradient descent turns out to be a kind of worst-case hard computational problem
• Quantum computing’s reproducibility crisis: Majorana fermions
• Regenerating Soft Robots through Neural Cellular Automata, Horibe et al. 2021 (code)
• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models, Bommasani et al. 2021: Stanford’s ~entire AI Department released this 200-page Neural Scaling Laws Manifesto(!) pivoting to positioning themselves as no.1 at academic ML Scaling (e.g. GPT-4) research

• Related, the scaling hypothesis:

  When OpenAI released GPT-3 last year, it was the biggest NN every trained by an order of magnitude, and to the surprise of almost everyone, the vast increase in size did not run into diminishing or negative returns, and the improvements from GPT-2 were qualitatively distinct and even more surprising in showing meta-learning e.g. while GPT-2 learned how to do common natural language tasks like text summarisation, GPT-3 learned how to follow directions and learn new tasks from a few examples.

  So the scaling hypothesis regards the blessings of scale as the secret of AGI: intelligence is ‘just’ simple neural units and learning algorithms applied to diverse experiences at a (currently) unreachable scale, so NNs will get smarter just by dumping more computational resources.

• How to Train Your Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning; Lessons We’ve Learned, Ibarz et al. 2021: deep RL is not as inefficient for real-life learning as commonly thought, but still incredibly hard
• Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead, Rudin 2018
• Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters, Henderson et al. 2017
• One-of-a-kind computers
• Andre Geim, the only person ever to have received both Nobel (for discovering graphene) and Ig Nobel (for levitating a frog using its intrinsic magnetism) prizes

Statistics/Meta-Science

• Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science, Chu et al. 2021: a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon
• Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature, Ziemann et al. 2016: about 1 in 5 published articles with Excel files contain gene name errors (Excel auto-correcting e.g. SEPT8, DEC1 and MARCH3 into dates or floating-point numbers), and Gene name errors: Lessons not learned, Abeysooriya et al. 2021: gene name errors in 30.9% of papers
• Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals, Cabanac et al. 2021: tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, and unacknowledged image reuse, all signs of AI-generated gobbledegook in papers that passed peer review
• The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research, Freedman et al. 2015: the cumulative prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research exceeds 50%, resulting in $28B/year spent on preclinical research that is not reproducible in the US alone
• Age and Scientific Genius, Jones et al. 2014
• Phase II and phase III failures: 2013–2015, Harrison 2016: 20-25% phase II compounds advance to phase III; 55-58% progress from phase III; 84-91% pass regulatory review
• Saving Soviet Science: The Impact of Grants When Government R&D Funding Disappears, Ganguli 2017: when USSR collapsed, George Soros provided one-time individual cash grants worth 1.7x average annual wage to 28,000 Soviet scientists, doubling publications on the margin in the next 3 years, increased the share of scientists staying in academia by 40% in the next 10 years
• Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?, Prinz et al. 2011
• Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science, The Open Science Collaboration, 2021: 97% of original studies had statistically significant results vs 36% of replications Diagonal line represents replication effect size equal to original effect size. Dotted line represents replication effect size of 0. Points below the dotted line were effects in the opposite direction of the original.
• So Useful as a Good Theory? The Practicality Crisis in (Social) Psychological Theory, Perkman et al. 2021
• Is Peer Review a Good Idea?, Heesen et al. 2021
• Sigmoids behaving badly: why they usually cannot predict the future as well as they seem to promise, Sandberg et al. 2021
• Explorable Multiverse Analyses, Dragicevic et al. 2019, e.g. in Challenging the Link Between Early Childhood Television Exposure and Later Attention Problems: A Multiverse Approach, McBee et al. 2019
• “I’ll Finish It This Week” And Other Lies, Brauer 2021: if you are coding or writing, multiply the expected time of any task by 1.5x; time-based goals are more achievable than result-based goals; but the real takeaway is the realisation of the importance of health and well-being we made along the way
• Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers, Liu et al. 2021
• Identification of successful mentoring communities using network-based analysis of mentor–mentee relationships across Nobel laureates, Chariker et al. 2017: Nobel laureates mentors Nobel laureates, centered on Cambridge University in the latter nineteenth century and Columbia University in the early twentieth century
• Quiz: Psychology results in top journals - can you guess which ones were true, and which didn’t replicate?

Psychology

• Pavlovian fear conditioning does not readily occur in rats in naturalistic environments, Zambetti et al. 2021
• Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence, Turpin et al. 2021
• Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents, Coyne et al. 2021 and Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents’ aggressive behaviour: evidence from a registered report, Przybylski et al. 2019
• A valid evaluation of the theory of multiple intelligences is not yet possible: Problems of methodological quality for intervention studies, Ferrero et al. 2021
• Lay people’s beliefs about creativity: evidence for an insight bias, Lucas et al. 2021: people undervalue persistence and overvalue insight in the creative process
• A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect, Vohs et al. 2021: to no one’s surprise, no ego-depletion effect found
• Related: Is Ego Depletion Real? An Analysis of Arguments, Friese et al. 2018

Politics/Religion

• Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube, Hosseinmardi et al. 2021: no evidence for algorithm-driven polarisation
• From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws, Gratton et al. 2021: after a surge of political instability in the early 1990s, Italian politicians passed a significant amount of poor-quality legislation and decreased bureaucratic efficiency
• Interest Group Responses to Reform Efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives: The Case of Big Sugar, Grier et al. 2021: amendments aiming to reduce huge Big Sugar subsidies were shot down first in 2013 and then 2018 (by a bigger margin), in the interim Big Sugar increased real contributions to House incumbents by more than 50%
• Christianization without economic development: Evidence from missions in Ghana, Jedwab et al. 2021
• A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea, Bunch et al. 2021: did God smite the sinners of Sodom with a meteor explosion 1000x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb?f
• Money’s Mutation of the Modern Moral Mind: The Simmel Hypothesis and the Cultural Evolution of WEIRDness, Harwick 2021
• The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices, Hong et al. 2021: Henrich: divination should be viewed as epistemic technology
• People are more tolerant of inequality when it is expressed in terms of individuals rather than groups at the top, Walker et al. 2021
• Reciprocal Scoring: A Method for Forecasting Unanswerable Questions, Karger et al. 2021: new method to create accountability from Tetlock
• Essay Content is Strongly Related to Household Income and SAT Scores: Evidence from 60,000 Undergraduate Applications, Alvero et al. 2021
• College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes, Broćić et al. 2021: college liberalises most students but promotes moral absolutism rather than relativism
• The Validity of the IAT and the AMP as Measures of Racial Prejudice, Clayton et al. 2020
• Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges, Paluck et al. 2020
• Partisan Bias in Surveys, Bullock et al. 2021: as a literal banana wrote, surveys are bullocks
• The Ties that Blind: Misperceptions of the Opponent Fringe and the Miscalibration of Political Contempt, Parker et al. 2021
• Fashion and art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition: quantitative evidence from music styles, Klimer et al. 2019: elite members want others to imitate their symbols, changes only occur when outsider groups successfully challenge the elite by introducing contrasting signals
• Related : The Logic of Fashion Cycles, Acerbi et al. 2012
• The coming of environmental authoritarianism, Beeson 2010: a Straussian reading of Xi’s increasingly dictatorial rule is that he’s centralising state capacity to steer China through the worsening political and environmental climates to come
• Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis : ¼ programs have negative ROI; some Ivy League degrees have negative ROI (full ROI table)

Technology

• Re-examining rates of lithium-ion battery technology improvement and cost decline, Ziegler et al. 2021: real price of lithium-ion cells declined 97% since their commercial introduction in 1991 Improvement rate is higher than previously thought
• Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors, Lovering et al. 2016: no single or intrinsic learning rate that we should expect for nuclear power technology, nor an expected cost trend Note: US (astronomical cost increase over time) vs South Korea (only country with sustained cost reduction)
• Response Time Limits: 0.1s limit for user to feel system is reacting instantaneous; 1s limit for user’s flow of thought; 10s limit for keeping user’s attention on the dialogue

Economics/Business/Finance

• Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say about Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States?, Neumark et al. 2021: in fact the literature points strongly towards negative effects of minimum wages on employment of less-skilled workers
• Revisiting the Beveridge Curve: Why Has It Shifted so Dramatically?, Lubik 2021: unprecedented outward shift of the Beveridge Curve (inverse relationship between unemployment rate and job opening rate) due to declined match efficiency and match elasticity; reduction of unemployment rate to pre-COVID levels would require double the job openings
• Related: Help Wanted: J.P. Morgan expect semiconductor, vehicle and other goods bottleneck to be self-resolving supply shocks, growth should rebound in 2022
• Elite Capture of Foreign Aid: Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts, Andersen et al. 2021: mean leakage rate of 7.5%
• Corporate Culture, Gorton et al. 2021
• Decrypting New Age International Capital Flows, Luckner et al. 2021: at least 7.4% of transactions on LocalBitcoins.com (world’s largest P2P Bitcoin exchange) are using Bitcoin to make payments in fiat currency, 20% of which are international currency movements
• How Does the World Bank Influence the Development Policy Priorities of Low-Income and Lower-Middle-Income Countries?, Knack et al. 2020: World Bank spending on analytical and advisory products vs developmental policy lending or investment lending services is 1:150, but while the former is effective at influencing low-income government policy, the latter is not at all
• Anti-money laundering: The world’s least effective policy experiment? Together, we can fix it, Pol 2020: <1% impact on criminal finances; compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds by >100X; civilians penalised more than criminals; data poorly validated and methodological inconsistencies rife
• Retail Trader Sophistication and Stock Market Quality: Evidence from Brokerage Outages, Eaton et al. 2021: unsophisticated retail investors (Robinhood) create inventory risks for market makers that harm liquidity
• Should SPAC Forecasts be Sacked?, Dambra et al. 2021
• An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory, Phalippou et al. 2020: PE firms have an 11% p.a. return since 2005 i.e. same as public equity indices, but the total performance fee (Carry) goes to a handful of PE firm partners, making them multibillionaires
• Do Any Economists Have Superior Forecasting Skills?, Qu et al. 2019: none could beat a simple equal-weighted average of peer forecasts
• Machine Learning Methods Economists Should Know About, Athey et al. 2019
• The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring, Bradley et al. 2018: none
• The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development, Kremer 1993

Philosophy/EA

• Stoic Ideology and Well-being, Karl et al. 2021: n=1,300 pre-registered study finds that stoicism is bad for your hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being
• Meta-analysis on belief in free will manipulations, Genschow et al. 2021: belief in free will can be decreased g= -0.29, increase belief in determinism g= 0.17, but have no downstream effects​​
• The search for predictable moral partners: Predictability and moral (character) preferences, Turpin et al. 2021: deontologists are preferred over utilitarians until the latters’ sacrificial decision is understood thus predictable
• The futility of decision making research, Weiss et al. 2021
• Narcissism in the Epistemological Pit, Swan et al, 2002

Fiction

• Motif-Index of Folk-Literature

Miscellaneous

• Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review, and Yes, X Causes Y
• Complexity Explained
• Creative coding algorithms & techniques
• Brutalist Websites
• Dead Startup Toys
• 1D Chess
• Intransitive dice, always pick second to have 5/9 probability of winning
• NandGame - Build a computer from scratch
• Same Energy: visual search engine
• Braess’s paradox
• Berkson’s paradox
• Neuromodulation Modalities
• Operation Choke Point
• Operation Midnight Climax: in the ‘50s as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the CIA paid prostitutes to lure their clients to safehouses to be dosed with drugs like LSD and monitored behind one-way glass (many CIA operatives indulged in the drugs and prostitutes for recreational purposes). Soon enough the operation expanded to dosing people in restaurants, bars, and beaches. Around the same time, Ken Kesey volunteered to be a medical guinea pig at a Project MKUltra study at Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital where he worked as a night aide, which inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and founded the Bay Area psychedelic scene. So yeah, the CIA invented hippies.
• Pope Sylvester II
• No Kum-sok
• Hyman G. Rickover, Father of the Nautilus
• Yan Xishan, the warlord who transcended the political compass
• In 1977, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and various prominent intellectuals, doctors and psychologists signed a petition addressed to the French parliament to abolish all age of consent laws (decriminalising all consensual relations between adults and minors)
• A French nun in the Middle Ages inexplicably began to meow like a cat, the other nuns in the convent began meowing too, eventually all the nuns meowed until the police threatened to whip them
• A legendary 19th-century Indian women Nangeli, in protest against the caste-based breast-cover tax (lower-caste women were not allowed to wear upper garments in public at all until 1859), cut off her own breasts and presented them in a banana leaf to the tax collector, then died of blood loss
• Ninja presence in Russia

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