Open Thread 456

Open Thread 456

...

Scott Alexander

Oct 19, 2026

57

535

3

Share

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

. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe

here

. Also:

1:

Meetup changes in Rockville, Northampton, Eindhoven, Great Barrington, Cairo, Portland, and Sofia.

Check the post

for more information.

2:

The Boston ACX meetup group has finished their

Greater Boston general election voting guide

. I may have more of these in the upcoming week. Still trying to figure out if we can do something for the Bay Area, but remember that SF mail-in ballot registration due date is end-of-day today (Monday), and that our main SF endorsement is

Scott Wiener

for Congress. We may have more later.

3:

I’m continuing to work on modeling (and maybe one day automating) some parts of AI grantmaking (you can see previous efforts

here

). I would once again like people who are well-versed in the AI/grantmaking worlds to take a survey on how much they value various things. This one involves assigning utility weights to ~80 different AI safety accomplishments.

Take it here

. After you’ve taken that survey, if you still have more time/energy it would be extra helpful for my data collection if you would take

this alternate version

, which asks you to predict how

I

would answer the first survey (so I can separate out worldview differences from weight-choosing random noise).

4:

Bay Area ACX meetup is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 10/24, 1 PM, at Mox in SF (1680 Mission St). I’ll probably make a post about it, but consider this an early heads-up.

5:

Grantee and Manifold Markets co-founder Stephen Grugett announces his latest project:

MNX

is a real-money prediction market on AI. It lets people sell futures representing AI company stocks, bet on AI company revenues directly, and a few other things like Epoch Capabilities Index targets. Interestingly, despite the talk of Anthropic’s API falling from from $2T to $1.5T, both Polymarket and MNX still price it around $2T.

6:

Friend of the blog Goodheart Labs is working on Common Notes, aka “Twitter Community Notes, but for everything”. They’re implementing it through a combination of AIs (who write most notes), users (who write others, and vote on which ones are helpful), and a browser extension (which makes the system show up on everything, including this blog).

Check it out, and install the browser extension, here.

57

535

3

Share

Previous

Next