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: Meetups this week include Abuja, Dublin, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Manchester, Montevideo, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Nairobi, Ottawa, Rio, Santiago, Singapore, Stockholm, Tokyo, Baltimore, Berkeley, Madison, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and many others. And late additions to the meetup list include Vilnius, Haifa, Vegas, and Durham. See the list for more.
2: There is a Boston preliminary municipal election this Tuesday; the Boston ACX meetup group has put together a voting guide, which you can find here.
3: Comments of the week, in both cases on the links post: Byrel Mitchell challenges the analogy between the Skrmetti Supreme Court case on transgender and the Bostock case on homosexuality. And Ryan W. writes his own poem in the style of the yeti example, with some help from AI.
4: 2024 ACX grantee Alexander Putilin has an update on his EEG entrainment replication project. He is looking for study participants and he is publishing the project’s source code:
A quick recap. The study “Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions” claims that entrainment (flashing a bright white light) at a person's individual peak alpha frequency (IAF) helps them learn to distinguish two types of patterns faster.
The project is to replicate one of the core claims of the paper: entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus with a trough of the person’s alpha rhythm (T-match) is significantly better entrainment at IAF + timing the stimulus of a peak of the same rhythm (P-match).
I am seeing early signs of the effect on myself. My performance in the T-match condition is noticeably better than in the P-match condition (64% vs 58% on average). I also subjectively feel like I am ‘learning more’ in the T-match condition. So I’m very optimistic about the study actually replicating.
I am now starting to collect the data. If you are in London, please consider signing up. Also, I’ll be doing a public demo and a Q&A at the London ACX meetup on the 13th of September at 2PM.
The code is now published on Github. If you own an EEG headset and experiment with the code, your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
The full replication results will be published on my psychotechnology substack.