Open Thread 381

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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. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:

1: ACX meetups this week in Bengaluru, Mexico City, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, and Denver. See the post for details.

2: Remember, the due date for the Everything-Except-Book Review Contest is TODAY, May 12. I will keep accepting entries until the end of the day, Pacific time, then start working on getting things organized so you can vote for finalists.

3: Curtis Yarvin aka Moldbug has responded to my post accusing him of selling out:

Scott asks a perfectly fair question: why I used to pearl-clutch so hard about authoritarian populism in 2008, but am perfectly okay with the Trump administration in 2025–despite all its manifest errors, incompetences, and even cruelties? Surely the answer is that I’ve Sold Out. No, Scott, I pearl-clutched in 2008 for the same reasons you’re doing it now: I was a libtard and a coward. I still am. I’ve just recovered a bit more.

…and goes on to “explain the logic of [his] corrected attitude toward authoritarian populism”. I respond to his response here.

4: A correspondent with an interest in hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder and visual snow syndrome asks readers with either of these conditions and the ability to create images/animations showing what it's like to get in touch. Specifically, he would like to know which condition you have, who diagnosed it (self, psychiatrist, ophthalmologist, etc), whether they ruled out the other condition, your image, and whether he has permission to use and share the images for scientific purposes. Please send to visual_disturbance_images.a71bn@simplelogin.com .

5: New subscriber-only post, The Twins Join The Linguistic-Symbolic Order, on my children’s first steps to language-learning. Includes my Seuss-Lovecraft mashups: