Open Thread 166

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This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild. Otherwise, post about whatever you want. Also:

1: Comments of the week: TSC finds I am mistaken about the history of escitalopram and also challenges the study I got my dose equivalents from.

2: Some people have noticed I sold one of my posts as an NFT. The story is pretty boring: someone emailed me offering to buy it for a very large amount of money. I considered whether it was unethical to accept, and decided the best course was to accept, offset the global warming cost, and donate most of the money to charity. I confirmed with the buyer that they understood the downsides of NFTs, and that they were rich enough not to care about the money; they did and they were. I donated ten times the highest credible estimate of the carbon cost to climate-change-related charities including a direct air capture charity whose offset claims are extra-trustworthy, and will be donating at least half the remainder to charity (while also keeping some amount <50% to incentivize myself to make similar deals in the future). I would not generally encourage people to buy NFTs.

3: I’ve pared your 105 book review contest entries down to 14 finalists (I know, that’s nine more than I said, but there were lots of good ones). I’ll be posting them at a rate of about two a week for the next two months. All finalists will be anonymous until after you vote on the winners, so that your votes will be blinded and unbiased. I tried to stay blinded myself, but messed up, and after that tried to do my best. One of the entries was by someone I’m close to, I did think theirs was one of the best, and I felt bad about either including them or auto-disqualifying them. I couldn’t think of a better solution than the one I chose, which was to add lots of extra finalist slots, including them. We’ll see if you vote for them or not.

4: A reader is working on collating the 89 non-finalists (also blinded) into a single document, which I’ll release when they’re done - probably a few weeks. I’ll ask people who read them to vote on which of the non-finalists was the best, and upgrade some of the winners (probably around three) to finalist status. So in the end you’ll probably get seventeen out of the promised five finalists.