"I decided to go through all 10 analysis sections to decide for myself. And I found that, in five of the 10 areas, Mueller seems to believe that all three criteria to charge a crime are supported by evidence.

1. Trump’s conduct toward Paul Manafort’s cooperation
2. Efforts to have Donald McGahn deny that Trump tried to fire Mueller
3. Efforts to curtail the Mueller probe
4. Efforts to fire Mueller
5. Conduct involving Michael Cohen"

I’m a social psychologist, so I’m interested primarily in the situational and contextual factors that drive human behavior. When you’re seeking to predict or explain a person’s actions, looking at the social norms, and the person’s context, is usually a pretty safe bet. Situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality, intelligence, or other individual-level traits.

So when I see a student failing to complete assignments, missing deadlines, or not delivering results in other aspects of their life, I’m moved to ask: what are the situational factors holding this student back? What needs are currently not being met? And, when it comes to behavioral “laziness,” I’m especially moved to ask: what are the barriers to action that I can’t see?

There are always barriers. Recognizing those barriers— and viewing them as legitimate — is often the first step to breaking “lazy” behavior patterns.

Astronomers are puzzling over a paucity of planets in the galaxy measuring between 1.5 and two times Earth's size.

“This game has the potential to inoculate a generation against misinformation. But it’s such a big problem, how do we meet the size of the challenge? Technology and gamification is a really powerful tool in being able to do that.”

"Carlsen said: “In chess, you know when you’ve done well and when you’ve done poorly, but it’s hard for me to take praise for fantasy league, when I’ve just been lucky.”"

"“Instagram vs. Reality” posts exposing the fake side of Instagram might help body image, suggests a new US study (n=305), which found that unrealistic images with photo editing tools increase women’s body dissatisfaction, but posts exposing these images as fake can improve women’s body image."

120% over target... whoops

"The new documents come as the climate crisis is nearing a tipping point, with average temperatures currently on pace to rise by 3.2 degrees Celsius above the baseline average temperature at the start of the industrial era, according to United Nations projections published in November. A separate study last month found the world’s 10 biggest fossil fuel-producing countries are on course to drill 120% more oil, gas and coal by 2030 than would be consistent with keeping warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which scientists project catastrophic change."

how do you interpret the different relationship between the two variables among Democrats and Republicans?

Lookahead+RAdam vs. Adam on some RL benchmarks

"The Ranger optimizer combines two very new developments (RAdam + Lookahead) into a single optimizer for deep learning. As proof of it’s efficacy, our team used the Ranger optimizer in recently capturing 12 leaderboard records on the FastAI global leaderboards (details here).

Lookahead, one half of the Ranger optimizer, was introduced in a new paper in part by the famed deep learning researcher Geoffrey Hinton (“LookAhead optimizer: k steps forward, 1 step back” July 2019). Lookahead was inspired by the recent advances in the understanding of neural network loss surfaces and presents a whole new way of stabilizing deep learning training and speed of convergence. Building on the breakthrough in variance management for deep learning achieved by RAdam (Rectified Adam), I find that combining RAdam plus LookAhead together (Ranger) produces a dynamic dream team and an even better optimizer than RAdam alone."

light on details

"DeepMind's version of reinforcement learning that uses "temporal value transport" to send a signal from reward backward, to shape actions, does better than alternative forms of neural networks. Here, the "TVT" program is compared to "Long-short-term memory," or LSTM, neural networks, with and without memory, and a basic reconstructive memory agent."

posted my comment on Tildes with links:

This research studied the charity of a foundation called GiveDirectly that specializes in cash transfers, and studying their effects. One of the authors is its co-founder.

I recently stumbled across this foundation in this GiveWell blog post of their 2019 top charities. I found this to be by far the most compelling on the list, both for their direct impact, and their support of research like this, which can go a long way to dispelling myths, and supporting more evidence-based charity as well as policies in developed countries like universal basic income.

They also have a page called GDLive in beta, which lists unedited survey responses to questions like personal impact, what could be improved, what the money was spent on, etc. If I find myself catastrophising my own problems, I find going there helps put my own problems into perspective, reminding me how privileged I am to have won the global birth lottery to have been born to hard-working immigrants that had the education and means to move to Canada (noticing the "invisible things that make my life easier" which "explains why most of us aren’t nearly as grateful as we ought to be" Freakonomics: Why Is My Life So Hard?). It's shocking to see how much of a life-altering difference a cash donation can make to these people, in amounts that often seem paltry to me.