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. Also:

1: Philip Tetlock and others have founded the Forecasting Research Institute to study prediction, including prediction of existential risk. They are looking to hire “research and data analysts, content editors, and RAs”, all roles remote, see here for details.

2: In case you missed it on Friday, I’m still hosting a contest to predict the course of 2023.

3: My post on crypto has gone viral. While I’m glad that people like it, I want to re-emphasize that I have a conflict of interest, in that generous blog readers have sometimes given me unsolicited large gifts of cryptocurrency (see Part 2 here for one example, there are others where people have asked to stay anonymous), and for various reasons I still have some of the money in crypto. I try not to let this conflict of interest shape my opinion but you can decide whether I have succeeded or not.

4: I may have somewhat fewer posts than usual over the next few weeks due to the holidays and some end-of-year business (hopefully including another ACX Survey), sorry.

5: Clearer Thinking received an ACX Grant to replicate psychology results at scale. They write:

We launched a new project (which received an ACX Grant) to help improve the replication crisis in psychology: Transparent Replications by Clearer Thinking! We're aiming to vastly increase the probability of studies in top journals being replicated in order to change researcher incentives. As soon as new psychology and behavior papers come out in Nature and Science (the two most prestigious general science journals), our plan is to replicate a study from nearly every one of them. Additionally, we'll be replicating randomly selected studies from PNAS, JPSP, and PSci shortly after they are released. You can check out our first three replications now!

And here’s a Vox article about their work.

Conventional wisdom is that intelligence-related studies replicate better than other fields, and Clearer Thinking is testing that now by trying to replicate 40 intelligence-related claims. They’re looking for experimental subjects to take their online tests; click here if you want to help. They promise you a breakdown of your cognitive strengths and weaknesses at the end, but be aware they won’t tell you your IQ and will only tell you percentile values relative to the other (highly selected) people who took their tests. Also, the Science Comprehension test is much more intense than the previous few; be prepared to put in a lot of thought if you don’t skip that one. Don’t exhaust yourself so much that you refuse to take the ACX Survey in a few weeks!