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: Update on the 2023 Forecasting Contest: We’re now working on sending everyone their scores. You should either have already gotten this email (from autoastralcodexten@gmail.com) or get it sometime in the next few days. Thanks to Leon for making this happen.

2: But also, in the process of sending these emails, we discovered that there was an ambiguity in the scoring criteria. By one possible algorithm, the winners were the people named in the original post. By the other, the winners were:

  • Datscilly, a** Metaculus Pro Forecaster who was ranked #1 on the Metaculus leaderboard from 2018 to 2021 for baseline accuracy.

  • Shahar Avin, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

  • Josh King, a technology lawyer, former wireless M&A guy, and advisor to startups who lives in Tucson, AZ and works as General Counsel for Realself.com.

  • Phil G, a software engineer in the US interested in AI and urbanism, who can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/pgodzin

  • Jan Kulveit , who leads ACSresearch.org, a research group working on how to have complex systems composed of AIs and humans exist in harmony. He sometimes teaches at events about rationality and epistemics organized by Fabric.

Some other winners from last time have moved up a spot in the new algorithm, including Ezra Karger (1st in Full Mode), Peter Wildeford (2nd in Full Mode) and Adam (1st in Blind Mode). Sorry for the ambiguity, and I’ll try to be more careful next time.

3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here , and my explanation of what’s going on is here.

4: Comment of the week - sort of, kind of, in a terrible warning type of way - is this Reddit thread on an AI-generated reading of my recent poem Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid. The commenters first “discover” that the poem must be written by an AI (because it has bullet points!), and then that “it is clear as day” that “at least half” of ACX commenters are AIs. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other ad infinitum of being AIs (“haven’t you heard of Dead Internet Theory?!”), while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background.