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: Congratulations to Daniel M, aka SmallSingapore, who finally checked his email after a month and realized he’d won the ACX Forecasting contest! Daniel describes himself as:

A lowly data analyst with a background in economics, from Chicago IL. I placed bets on PredictIt during the 2016 election cycle and came out slightly behind after transaction fees, but otherwise have no formal forecasting experience. My “strategy” consisted of going with my gut (cue the Colbert clip) and skipping the questions where I had no prior information to go off of. I credit all success to luck and mindlessly absorbing copious amounts of information on Twitter (mostly TPOT accounts). If people want to contact me, they can do so at smallsingapore[at]gmail[dot]com (I’ll respond more promptly, I promise haha).

2: There were some technical difficulties with the forecasting score hashes last time. Here are some improved versions, total score only, sorry.

Blind Score Hash

60.2KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Full Score Hash

12.9KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

Go to this site and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages on this graphic from the post. Thanks again to Leon for making this work.

3: Several things I’ve been asked to recommend this Open Thread, including:

  • Newspeak House is a center of the London rationalist community. It describes itself as “an independent residential college since 2015” teaching “a one year course on Introduction To Political Technology” which is “designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions”. Given the name this all sounds slightly sinister, but next year’s course is open and you can sign up here.

  • The Tract team is in the Bay this month and looking to connect with “YIMBY angel investors who are interested in tech solutions to vetocracy” as well as YIMBY campaigners, urban planners, and zoning nerds. If that’s you, contact them at jamie[at]buildwithtract[dot]com

  • The Japanese AI safety community apparently exists and is holding a Technical AI Safety Conference in Tokyo in, uh, four days, so if you’re interested sign up quickly. Attendance is free, it looks like the talks are in English, and featured speakers include Dan Hendrycks and researchers from Anthropic and DeepMind.

  • GiveWell is looking for a new Head of Philanthropy, which I think means mostly fundraising. $200K+ salary, office/remote optional, international candidates welcome.

4: Several people have asked me to recommend their blog in the Substack Recommendations system. I have a blanket policy of always refusing, because otherwise I would worry about offending someone and stumble into recommending everybody. If your blog is good, I will hopefully come across it and recommend it without you asking me, sorry.