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: In case you missed it the past few times: please take the ACX Survey, expected time 20 - 40 minutes, results will be used to satisfy my curiosity and test weird hypotheses.

2: This is your last chance to submit guesses to the 2023 Prediction Contest in Blind Mode, or to resubmit more up-to-date predictions if you submitted earlier and really want to do that (I will try to remove predictions about things that changed too much over the past few weeks, so don’t feel obligated).

3: Some well-timed sort-of-support for my thesis in Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life, Not An Excuse For Rejecting Internet Surveys:

Jay Van Bavel @jayvanbavel

Representative samples may be overrated. A replication of 27 survey experiments (n = 101,745) finds that convenience samples overwhelmingly produce similar findings to representative samples. pnas.org/doi/full/10.10… In 0 of 393 analyses were the effects in opposite directions.

12:25 PM ∙ Jan 5, 2023

---

2,043Likes415Retweets

4: Comment of the week: Lars Doucet tries to defend the claim in the recent Bay Area House Party post that the moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem (see also David Manheim and Robert Jones’ replies, and the threads underneath them). Also, Adam Strandberg corrects me: there are at least three immortal mammals, although the third one is also a Tasmanian Devil.

5: The “SHRIMP LOVE ME, UNALIGNED AIS FEAR ME” t-shirt mentioned in the post was based on (a misremembered version of) Nathan Young’s submission here. Reader @dropbella has since turned this into a reality; you can buy the cap here.

6: Also, many, many of you commented that Bob and Ramchandra were just “reinventing the wheel” and antistocks were the same as some existing financial product, although none of you could agree on which existing product it was. See the cases for bucket shops, call options, equity swaps / total return swaps, dividend derivatives, and (inevitably) prediction markets. Also, several people chimed in to say they were working on something similar on the blockchain, including Tracer and Synthetix. I hope I don’t need to add the disclaimer that if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.

7: People often ask me for psychiatrist/therapist recommendations. I don’t have any especially good ones, although a while back I got SSC readers to create this reference. But I notice there’s nobody in Austin on there and I have gotten an Austin-based request specifically. If anyone knows good psychiatrists, therapists, or couples counselors in Austin (or licensed to work in Texas), please let me know.