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.

Seeds of Science is also looking for more authors to feature on its Best of Science Blogging feed - please reach out and share some of your work if you would like to be considered (info@theseedsofscience.org)”

6: I’m still waiting for some technical 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.