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: Correction to Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders: if schizophrenia is 80-20 genetic, that means genes matter 2x as much as the environment, not the more intuitive 4x, see here for more. This somewhat invalidates my simulations, but in a way that makes my point stronger rather than weaker, so whatever. See also this commenter’s more sophisticated model.

2: Correction to Psychopolitics Of Trauma: The study I cited on people making more errors in political reasoning failed to replicate (more discussion here). I cited that as an example of a larger literature about political reasoning errors (see eg here), but for all I know that larger literature doesn’t replicate either. I do think that the Wason task (which does replicate) suggests context-dependent reasoning errors like these should be common. See also Part V of this post for more on how I think of these kinds of questions.

3: Correction to Should The Future Be Human: As part of my argument that humans would not merge with AIs, I cited our multi-thousand year history of not merging with earlier tools like swords and guns. But LosTiburon on the Discord was able to find this story about a medieval Italian man merging with a knife. ACX regrets the error.

4: New subscriber-only post: Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island, a short fiction story based on this from Marginal Revolution.

5: ACX Grantee Seeds of Science asks me to make the following announcement:

"Seeds of Science would like to announce a new initiative for supporting independent researchers - the SoS Research Collective (announcement post). In brief, members of the Collective receive the following: a title (SoS Research Fellow) and profile page on our website, payment of $50 for each peer-reviewed article published in the SoS journal (learn more about our format and review process here), editing and advising services, and promotion on the SoS Substack. Independent researchers and early-career academics who conduct research activities outside of their academic work are welcome to apply. To apply, shoot us an email (info@theseedsofscience.org) that tells us who you are and what your research is about—CV, website, blog, twitter, etc.—and we will go from there. 

6: I’m still waiting for some bank issues to get resolved for this year’s ACX Grants. Depending on how that goes, I’ll post results either this Friday, or next Friday.

7: All Middle East-related Open Thread comments still need to be contained on the Middle East subthread on the bottom.