Open Thread 365

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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: METR is an organization that tries to measure AI vs. human performance. They need to measure some humans to set the baseline, specifically in software engineering, cybersecurity, and ML tasks, and are looking for contractors with experience in these fields. Pay is $100/hour base rate plus bonuses for performance; time commitment is ~16 hours before the end of January. Remote contracting job, very flexible, and you get to be this generation's Kasparov. See here for more information, or go here to apply directly.

2: More comments on Lynn and IQ: Lizzard attacks, Cremieux defends, Lyman Stone thinks there’s something off about how national IQ estimates change over time (still paywalled, sorry!), Sebjenseb responds to Lyman (free to read, there’s lots of other stuff, CTRL+F “change over time”).

3: Comments from Links: Vlaakith Outrance on A16Z returns, Erusian on dominance within party systems, Hadi Khan corrects my AI training cost numbers (but it ends up not mattering much), and someone linked Alice Evans’ posts on Turkey and fertility (Lyman Stone supposedly discusses this too, though the post is paywalled). And in response to the story about the Chinese warlord misunderstanding basketball, a Jewish friend relates a suspiciously similar legend:

It's said that Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky was asked whether you can play basketball on Shabbat. He asked what basketball is, and they said "it's a game where you have to put the ball in the basket," so Rav Kanievsky asked, "Why don't they just leave the ball in the basket from before Shabbos"? Some say this didn't happen, some say he was making a joke, and some say he didn't know about basketball or the entire concept of a game.

[EDIT: update on Rav Kanievsky’s level of basketball knowledge]