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: Many of you enjoyed Lars Doucet’s book review on Georgism and subsequent followup posts; he also won an ACX Grant to further investigate. Now he’s turning his Georgist work into a book, Land Is A Big Deal, due out October 15:

He says that for complicated book industry reasons, pre-orders are more valuable to him than post-orders, so if you’re interested then go to the website and pre-order today. Also in ebook and audiobook version.

2: New EA contest: change the Future Fund’s opinion about AI risk, win up to $500,000. Some people have expressed concern that this pattern-matches to the kind of cranks who say things like “I will give $1 million to anyone who can prove that the Queen is not a lizard!”, but here’s my pitch for taking it seriously: Future Fund spends tens of millions of dollars on AI risk each year, they would genuinely like to know whether they should stop doing it (or do it more), and they’ve gotten independent superforecasters to be the judges. Also they’ve promised to pay out at least $50,000 each to the best three entries regardless of whether anything changes their mind or not. Keep in mind that you can win for convincing them to be less concerned, more concerned, or concerned in a different way - you can find their current positions and the full rules here. This is an interesting new kind of epistemic institution and I look forward to seeing what happens.

3: Speaking of interesting epistemic institutions, Spencer Greenberg is running a prediction market tournament to decide what charities to fund. It uses play money, is free to join, and winners will get real-money prizes. You can learn more and start participating here.

4: ACX meetups update: this week we have Tallinn on Monday, Tanzania on Thursday, Princeton + Irvine on Saturday, and Berlin + Dublin + Barcelona + Denver on Sunday - plus many more. And if you went to a meetup, Mingyuan would like to hear how it went - especially from organizers, but attendees are welcome to respond too. You can send her this form.