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. In this week’s news:

1: Nicholas C, who likes the book review contest, is trying to coordinate a general ACX community book rating system. You can use it here. I forgot to get permission to share his email address but hopefully he’ll show up in the comments and you can talk about it there.

2: In my ivermectin post, about a third of the way down, are two analyses of whether a raw meta-analysis makes it look like ivermectin works. I concluded that they showed marginal effect, but that this was probably due to other factors (eg antiparasitic properties). A reader points out that it was wrong to do this by t-test, and I should have used a DerSimonian-Laird test because it’s a meta-analysis, which would have shown a clear (not marginal) effect, so I updated the post and my Mistakes page. More recently, another reader has commented that a DerSimonian-Laird test is also inappropriate because the studies aren’t homogenous, and now I’m not sure which test is appropriate or what result it would give - but it definitely wasn’t the one I originally tried. I don’t think this significantly alters the overall conclusion of the post, which was that the apparent effect (whether marginal or clear) was better explained by other things.

3: Michael Shellenberger, candidate for governor of California, objected to my characterization of his opinions in my gubernatorial candidates post:

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

@slatestarcodex Thank you for correcting the error about my position about Suboxone, but you make another error claiming I support “sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill.” That’s simply false. I address this issue at length in my book and writings. Please correct it.

May 30th 2022

5 Retweets129 Likes

I’ve provisionally corrected it and added an entry to my Mistakes page, and plan to read Shellenberger’s book to get a better sense of exactly what he does and doesn’t support. Sorry for the error.

4: Some highlights from the last Classifieds thread: Anti-factory-farming charity seeking litigation attorney, John Schilling needs spaceship tech support people, Russian emigre looking for work/study in data science or AI alignment, can a doctor help give marketing/distribution advice for underused COVID drug?