This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:

1: Last month I wrote a post, Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem, about some of Andrés Gomez Emilsson’s theories. Anders has since written a post of his own giving longer commentary on some of the things I said and explaining his theories in more length. Check it out!

2: The effective altruism movement is launching EA Virtual Programs, some online courses and discussion groups and book clubs and so on. If interested, apply before November 28.

3: Still a lot of pushback on the Great Families posts (one of the most common comments on the ivermectin post was “this is so much more evidence-based than that family stuff”). I’m wondering if I’ve been blogging so long and cast such a wide net that I’ve collected readers who aren’t familiar with _The Nurture Assumption (_book full of evidence that parenting styles and effects of early home environment don’t matter for most outcomes later in life, within normal bounds) - anyone know of a good refresher I can link people to? But maybe some of you want to argue they matter for the top 0.01% - small enough that nobody will ever notice in a study, but enough to explain Darwins and Huxleys?

(Related: new study confirms no association between parenting and Big Five personality traits)

4: Also, several people pointed out that an ideal experiment would involve taking a really talented family, adopting away one of their kids at birth, and seeing what happened to them. I know of one case almost like this. Mathematician Paul Nemenyi was one of the Martians, a group of supersmart Hungarian Jews who revolutionized mid-20th-century physics. His legitimate son Peter Nemenyi was a prominent statistician who invented the Nemenyi test (which I have never heard of, but which is apparently the same as the Wilcoxon test, which I vaguely have). But Paul also had an affair that produced an illegitimate child, who was raised entirely by his mother without any contact with the other Nemenyis: Bobby Fischer, later world chess champion. It’s unclear if Fischer ever knew he was a Nemenyi relative, although Paul Nemenyi seemed to. I don’t know of any other good examples of this - unless the Justin Trudeau - Fidel Castro conspiracy theory turns out to be true (it isn’t).

5: Deadline for applying for an ACX Grant is end of day this Thursday.