Open Thread 427
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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 Grantee 1DaySooner is looking for a Policy Lead for their Clinical Trial Abundance work. Work will be remote but DC location a plus, $100K - $145K salary, see here for more information and the application form.
2: Newspeak House, one of the London centres of our conspiracy, is accepting applications for their 2026 fellowship program, “Introduction to Political Technology”. They describe it as:
…designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the political technology landscape in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions […] This is not a conventional taught course in which participants attend lectures and pass by showing up. Rather, it is an immersive year spent finding your place within an existing practitioner network and engaging with the field of political technology through its institutions, events, tools, norms, and accumulated body of work.
See here for more information / to apply.
3: Several people complained about last week’s post Every Debate On Pausing AI. I tried to respond to individual comments individually, but my more general response:
Some people thought I was strawmanning, in the sense of denying that there could be good objections to pausing AI. I tried to explicitly say in the post that such objections existed and were worthy of debate. I was complaining that, instead of discussing such objections, the real-world debate has mostly failed to progress beyond people falsely claiming that a pause has to be unilateral.
Other people complained that, even if I thought this was mostly true, it was wrong of me to describe this as “Every” debate on pausing AI. I thought this was within the joke meaning of “Every” used in titles like Every Bay Area House Party, ie “humorously capturing the Platonic form of the thing”, but it sounds like it didn’t come across this way, so I’ll be careful around that in the future.
Still other people asked good questions about what details of an AI pause would look like. The most fleshed-out plan that’s currently public is this one, which I haven’t read in enough detail to have strong opinions on. But another one that I’m excited about will come out soon, and I’ll cover it (and this topic) in more detail then.
4: New subscriber only post - Book Review: The White King Of La Gonave. Autobiography of a US Marine who unintentionally ended up as king of a small Caribbean island:
In 1896, two Polish immigrants in Pennsylvania gave birth to a young boy with the unlikely name of “Palestine Wirkus”. People must have found that as weird then as we would now - albeit for different reasons - because at some point they renamed him to the much more normal-sounding “Faustin Wirkus”. This decision would go on to change the course of his life and, eventually, world history.
5: I’ll be away the next few weeks on an Important Journalistic Fact-Finding Mission. I’ll post some old essays from the queue, but they might not be very timely, and I’ll respond to comments and emails less than usual. This also means I’ll miss the first half of Inkhaven - sorry to anyone who I told I would be there - but I’ll still be around for the second half.