Open Thread 225

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This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. In this week’s news:

1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.

These were selected more or less by popular vote. I’m still reading some entries and might give them Honorable Mention status (or maybe promote them to finalist?) if I find more I like. I’ll probably do this at least for Exhaustion: A History and maybe others. But for now, if you’re not an official finalist, you should feel free to post your review on your own blog or do whatever else you want with it. If I end up liking yours later, I won’t disqualify it just because you did something else. Also, there were many incredibly amazing reviews this year, please don’t feel bad if you didn’t win. I’ll say more about this later.

2: Thanks to everyone who donated to or otherwise supported Carrick Flynn. Unfortunately he didn’t win. Some discussion here. I’m not sorry for urging people to support him; I think it was a good bet in expectation. I might be sorry for saying I thought he was more likely to win than the prediction markets said; I was going off rumors of positive polls, and I still need to figure out what happened there.