Open Thread 378

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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: ACX meetups this week in Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Atlanta, Philly, Brooklyn, and Dallas, among others. And late additions to the list include Belfast, Vancouver, and Stockholm. See the post for details. And remember there’s a feedback form for meetup-goers.

2: Reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is coming up on May 12.

3: I sent all ACX Grants recipients an email with a link to a form asking for updates. I think it went to spam for many of you. If you got a grant either last year or 2021-2022, please check your spam folder for an email from me.

4: Sorry for the delay, AMA with the AI 2027 team is planned for this Friday, 3:30 - 6 Pacific time. I’ll post a confirmation of this later this week.

5: Upcoming AI policy opportunities:

• Samuel Hammond and the Foundation for American Innovation are launching a conservative AI policy fellowship. “A six week educational fellowship for DC policy professionals interested in AI policy.”

• Horizon Institute has a three-day AI Innovation And Security Policy Workshop. “Interested in whether you should pursue a career in AI policy in DC? Learn about AI policy under the new administration, meet the people shaping decisions in DC, and decide whether you want to apply your background to the opportunities and challenges ahead.”

• Ted Cruz and the Commerce Committee are looking for an AI Counsel.

6: Some more replies to my Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does post, including by Aashish Reddy.

7: New subscribers-only post, Yet Another Reason To Hate College Admissions Essays:

Five, maybe ten percent of applicants are some kind of special snowflake whose father was murdered when they were five years old. As he lay there bleeding out, he said “Daughter, my whole life, I dreamed of being the first LGBT person to get a PhD in the study of ancient Assyria. Now that dream has been taken from me. With my dying breath, I give you my trowel and hand-painted figurine of Tiglath-Pileser III, in the hopes that one day you will succeed where I failed”. […]

The rest of us are just some kid who wants to go to college because that’s where all the good jobs are. If you really press us, we’ll say something like “idk biology seems pretty cool”. We encountered an approximately average number of hardships. Once when we got our wisdom teeth taken out, the surgeon said we had the weirdest reaction to anaesthesia he’d ever seen - does that count as a hardship?

(“Yes, but why are you applying to Dartmouth in particular?” “Because we looked at the US News & World Report rankings and realized we weren’t good enough to get into colleges better than Dartmouth, but we were too good for colleges worse than Dartmouth, any other stupid obvious questions?”)

The college admissions essay is what happens when you tell the second type of person that, in order to ever get a job better than busboy, they need to pretend to be the first type of person.

And a commenter goes further with a Lacanian argument that “the college essay causes psychological harm”.