Open Thread 420
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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: A team from King’s College London is studying AI spirituality, AI relationships, and other uses of AI for “personal guidance”. If you’re over 18 and “this resonates with you”, they’d like you to take a survey, which will take ~10-30 minutes.
2: I was able to get info on one more ACX Forecasting Contest winner:
Nathan Metzger ("Haiku") is a longtime volunteer in the PauseAI movement, the lead organizer for PauseAI Phoenix, and a board member of PauseAI US. By day, he is a test automation developer, and occasionally a pro forecaster. He started forecasting in mid 2023, was confused that he was good at it, and was unable to stop. He spends the remainder of his time attempting to mitigate the risk of human extinction from AI.
Seems potentially bad that so many of the people who win forecasting contests are professionally involved in some form of worrying about AI killing us. Hopefully that’s just a coincidence.
3: ACX Grantee Mike Saint-Antoine is teaching a weekend seminar on the basics of computational biology March 7-8 in New York City. The only prerequisite is basic Python, no biology knowledge required. More info here, and link to sign up here. This is part of Fractal University, a learning and teaching community in NYC that offers classes on lots of interesting subjects.
4: Corrections/clarifications/commentary on some of last week’s links:
Daniel Tilken says $318B, not $170B, might solve extreme poverty
Brinedew on fundamental cancer vs. diseases-of-aging tradeoffs (recommended!)
Richard Hanania vs. claim that liberals don’t really have worse mental health
5: Several people have asked why I delete comments that get someone banned, saying they would like to be able to see them to double-check that my moderation decisions are reasonable, or to learn more about the rules and where the bar is. I agree this would be ideal, but Substack seems to auto-delete comments that get bans, and I can’t figure out how to turn off this feature. Sorry for the inconvenience.