Open Thread 355

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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. Also:

1: New subscribers-only post, Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims, about when you should vote for a worse candidate to punish a better candidate.

2: Comments on things related to last week’s Polymarket post: Michael Wiebe argues that Theo the French whale’s contrarian polling take was based on a simple misunderstanding of how to read polls (I stand by my claim that a single success demonstrates almost nothing about the trustworthiness of the underlying process). And Alex Tabarrok says more about why this was a big victory for prediction markets.

3: More responses to responses on the California shoplifting policing situation, this time from a former public defender. I continue to be confused where in the system the decision not to arrest shoplifters is happening and why, and continue to welcome more informed analysis of this.

4: I think of the Open Thread as a place for asking questions, proposing ideas, and having semi-structured discussion. If you’re going to do something else, don’t do it regularly, and try to be at least kind of coy about it. In particular, don’t advertise your blog more than once every six months, and try to frame it as discussion (“here’s an issue I’ve been thinking about, here’s a paragraph of so of analysis, you can read my blog for more”) and not just a raw link. Same if you’re going to drop what is basically a whole blog post as an OT comment.

5: I’ll post the AI Art Turing Test results either this week or next, sorry for the delay.