This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Obvious change is obvious. There are still some bugs to be ironed out, and ironed they will be. Thanks to Michael Keenan and Trike (especially Catherine Truscott) for some help. All positive changes are theirs; all remaining flaws are due to my pickiness alone. My obsessiveness finally overcame my laziness and I standardized the ads too; if you’re an advertiser and you don’t like it, send me an email and we’ll talk.

2. I’ve also added a bunch of new links to the blogroll. The categorization system isn’t very serious (some of you may recognize it?) and I’m still thinking about how I want to do it on a longer-term basis.

3. I’m grateful for all the interesting comments I received about cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helped me understand it a lot better. The impression I’m getting is that its ‘insights’ seem obvious/patronizing to everybody, but the real agent of change is forcing you to do the worksheets and exercises on a regular basis until they’ve really sunk in. Comment of the week is Mirzhan Irkegulov describing his experiences with it.

4. After the successes of other people in the community like Alicorn and Miri and Gwern, and multiple strong recommendations, I am opening a Patreon account so you can give me money. I DO NOT NEED MONEY (though, like many people, I like it). I have a job and am fairly comfortable. This blog is provided free and there is in no sense an implied agreement that if you like it you are under pressure to donate. I also don’t want to funge against anyone giving to charity or anybody who needs money more than I do. But if you feel a burning, burning desire to give me money, and it’s not going to prevent it from going to anything more important, well, now you can. My Patreon account is here. I am a little proud of the subtitle.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Comment of the week is queenshulamit on Pope Francis being a tricksy Jesuit

2. I’m interested in switching this blog to a two-sidebar design kind of like Popehat so I can have more links. I can’t do the CSS myself. If anyone thinks they can help, let me know. [EDIT: Already have offers, no more necessary, thanks]

Please steer the open thread away from the five toxic topics that mindkill SSC readers: race, gender, doge, one-tailed t-tests, and cuddling.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Some people frustrated with the commenting system here are trying out r/slatestarcodex, a subreddit where they can comment on recent SSC articles with all of the upvoting and downvoting their heart desires.

2. Comments of the week are Edward Scizorhands on why banning discrimination based on college degrees might be easier than you think, Larry Kestenbaum on the surprisingly sane employment policies of the US post office, Jaime Astorga on a metaphor for college maybe even better than my tulips one (old, but I missed it the first time), haishan on why driverless cars aren’t legal yet, Pax Dickinson on purges, and Brandon Berg on Tom Swifties.

3. If you’re into effective charity, there may currently be an unusually high-impact opportunity to donate to Giving What We Can.

4. I finally cleared my backlog of reported comments. Fwhgdsd is now banned indefinitely and RCF for one month; check the Register of Bans for more information. Everyone else gets a general amnesty, on statute-of-limitation-type considerations.

Please steer the open thread away from the five toxic topics that mindkill SSC readers: race, gender, doge, one-tailed t-tests, and cuddling.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever.

This week, there are no comments that need signal-boosting, no links that need correcting, no one in special need of your money, and no changes to the usual volume of blogging. But you might still want to avoid talking about race and gender.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Corrections from last week’s links: thinking probably doesn’t fuel brain cancers (thanks, Urstoff), and the discussion of the psychology replication results is still preliminary and shouldn’t have been published.

2. Comment of the week is vV_Vv asking a question of Jewish law.

3. This is your semi-annual reminder that this blog supports itself by the Amazon affiliates program, so if you like it, consider buying some of the Amazon products I mention, clicking on the Amazon link on the sidebar, or changing your Amazon bookmark to my affiliate version so I will get a share of purchases. Consider also taking a look at other sponsors MealSquares and Beeminder.

4. Continue to expect a lower volume of blogging for the near future.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Comments of the week are Scott McGreal actually reading the supplement of that growth mindset study, and gwern responding to the cactus-person story in the most gwernish way possible.

2. Worthy members of the in-group who need financial help: CyborgButterflies (donate here) and as always the guy who runs CrazyMeds (donate by clicking the yellow DONATE button on the right side here)

3. I offer you a statistical mystery a little closer to home than the ones we usually investigate around here: how come my blog readership has collapsed? The week-by-week chart looks like this:

Notice that the week of February 23rd it falls and has never recovered. In fact, I can pinpoint the specific day:

Between February 20th and February 21, I lost about a third of my blog readership, and they haven’t come back.

Now, I did go on vacation starting February 20 and make fewer posts than normal during that time, but usually when I don’t post for a while I get a very gradual drop-off, whereas here, the day after a relatively popular post, everyone departs all of a sudden. And I’ve been back from vacation for a month and a half without anything getting better.

I would assume maybe WordPress changed its method of calculating statistics around that time, but I can’t find any evidence of this on the WordPress webpage. That suggests it might be a real thing. Did any of you leave around February 20th for some reason and not check the blog again until today? Did anything happen February 20th that tempted you to leave and you only barely hung on? I get self-esteem and occasionally money from blog hits, so this is kind of bothering me.

4. I want to clarify that when I discuss growth mindset, the strongest conclusion I can come to is that it’s not on as firm ground as some people seem to think. I do not endorse claims that I have “debunked” growth mindset or that it is “stupid”. There are still lots of excellent studies in favor, they just have to be interpreted in the context of other things.

…or Lygos, Byzantium, Miklagard, Nea Roma, Tsargrad, or any of the others

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Still busy. Continue to expect less blogging.

2. There were some good counterarguments to some of the links in my last link roundup that I wanted to highlight before anyone gets misled. Luis Coelho points out some problems with the microbiome-sweetener theory. Albatross doesn’t believe that hospitals are raking in the dough. And Scott Sumner says contra Paul Krugman that interstate migration to the south is driven by low taxes, not good weather.

3. Comments of the week are Navin Kumar on poverty traps, Ivvenalis on military suicide, and Janet Johnson on what her work as an educational consultant has taught her about “growth mindset”

4. I’ve given up on Ozy ever posting any more open threads at their place, but you still can’t discuss race and gender here. No, life isn’t fair.

(source)

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. I’ll be pretty busy at work for the next few months, so expect a lower volume of blogging.

2. Comments of the week expand on the discussion of what is a “religion” vs. a “culture”, and bring up the importance of narrative and whether you can base a country on it.

I don’t know if Ozy’s still posting open threads on their blog. If they do, I’ll link it.

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Thanks to everyone who attended the meetups earlier this month. It was nice to finally get to meet some of you. For those of you at the Google meetup, Jesse has created a relevant internal mailing list at slatestarcodex-discuss

2. Relevant to the title: Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality is ending Saturday. For those of you who aren’t familiar, this is a Harry Potter fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who taught me most of what I know about rationality and writing. Most people either love it or hate it in a hilarious over-the-top way; since both are interesting, I can highly recommend it to people who like that sort of thing. See also the Vice article about it. You can find the story at HPMOR.com.

3. And for those of you who are familiar, you might be interested in the HPMOR wrap parties going on Saturday in various cities around the world. Check the map here to see if there’s one with you, or get more information on this page.

4. I’m on call Saturday morning, but if it’s not too hectic I’m going to try to make the Detroit party, which looks like it’s about 20 people strong now. If anyone else in Michigan is interested, come to 1481-A Wordsworth, Ferndale, Michigan 48220 at 3 PM and hopefully I’ll see you there.

5. If you are a high school student, you might want to think about applying to SPARC, a free camp for talented children focusing on game theory, cognitive science, and statistics. Many of the instructors are friends of mine and/or Slate Star Codex readers, and one of the instructors is the aforementioned Eliezer Yudkowsky. See their website for more details and the application.

6. Comment of the week is this real-life trolley problem and the British government’s weird response to it.

7. A request for legal advice, but it’s long enough that I’ll stick it in the comments rather than write it all out here.

1. I’m off to California, so no blogging for a while. I’ll see some of you at Ruby and Miranda’s wedding on Saturday. Everyone else, I will have a post on meetup times up no later than this weekend. Yell at me if I forget.

2. Comments of the week: Douglas Knight explains heritability statistics, Gwern gives an economics answer to a statistics question, a health care economist discusses why it’s a weird market and how to improve it

3. I think I have room for another ad of about the same size and shape as the MealSquare one in around the same area. If anyone wants to pay for such, email me with an offer. For comparison, the MealSquares ad has gotten about 700 clicks a month.

Remember, no race and gender on the open thread. Ozy will put up a parallel open thread over at their place for you to talk about that.