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 Mantic Monday 1/29: the article discusses how prediction markets did poor-to-mediocre last election. Maxim Lott adds the useful context that over a longer period of three election cycles they’ve generally done pretty well.

2: Commentary on It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic: Dr. Awais Aftab, author of the article I was responding to, has his own response here. I agree with his first point that variance statistics don’t exactly and numerically map to the real world. In response to his second point, part of my argument is that there may never be a satisfying unitary story of schizophrenia (any more than there will be a satisfying unitary story of what causes kidney disease), so instead of treating genes as the IOU for the satisfying story downstream of the genes, we should just go with the genes. Further commentary by Emil Kirkegaard.

3: New subscriber-only post: Links At Length: Democratic Socialists’ Budget Crisis

4: I recently saw someone recommend only including the first paragraph of a post in emails, then including a “go to website” link afterwards. The advantage is that if I edit a post after writing it (which I almost always do) readers can read the edited version instead of the flawed original. How do readers feel about this? Would anyone be significantly inconvenienced by getting these as link-emails rather than full-post-emails? [EDIT: Okay, enough of you have said you need the full email that I’ve made up my mind and you can stop replying . . . although I guess those of you in that situation won’t see this edit. Darn!]

5: I would still like all Middle East discussion on the Middle East Containment Subthread at the bottom of the Open Thread.

6: ACX Grants results will probably be announced Friday, February 9. Sorry for the delay.