Open Thread 443

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: ACX grantee Trevor Klee is looking for subjects for a study of his NeutraOat product, meant to protect against PFAS “forever chemicals”. Although this sounds like RFKslop, there’s decent evidence that these are dangerous and that some high-risk groups might be served well by reducing their exposure. Trevor writes:

NeutraOat is a modified oat fiber that's designed to selectively bind PFAS and certain other environmental toxicants in the gut, preventing them from being reabsorbed and reducing their levels in the blood. Following successful in-vitro tests in a simulated digestive system, we are now running a 12 week, at-home pilot in individuals with high PFAS levels, especially people with exposure to firefighting foams. For those who qualify, the pilot is completely free, and comes with before-and-after PFAS tests and vitamin/blood panels.

For more information on the pilot and to apply, visit pilot.neutraoat.com . If you’re wondering why you should care about PFAS levels at all, I recently wrote a blog post that there’s no safe level of PFAS exposure. Given that ~97% of Americans have some amount of PFAS in their blood, that’s bad news for just about everyone.

And please note: the pilot is purely for scientific purposes. We will not market to you or sell your data. We just want to see if this works as well as we think it does.

2: MIRI wants to march on Washington DC to stop the development of superintelligent AI. They’re trying an assurance contract: if you’d be interested in joining a 100,000 person protest, sign up, and you’ll be “activated” once the number of signatories reaches a hundred thousand.

3: Our conspiracy is trying to get its tentacles into a new set of universities ahead of the 2026-27 academic year. If you’re at one of their target schools (Duke, Vanderbilt, NYU, USC, and ~30 other colleges of approximately that tier) and interested in starting an AI safety student group, read this post and contact the people involved. Don’t do this if you’re just trying to pad your resume for a capabilities job, they will stare into your soul and catch you.

4: New subscribers-only post, Six Slightly Skew Boogeymen. Example:

The Grimmmeluch is an eight-foot-tall skeletal wolf-creature that feeds on human flesh and can smell fear. Luckily, it’s repulsed by the smell of fear, so it won’t eat anyone who’s afraid of it. And since it’s an eight-foot-tall skeletal wolf creature, that’s pretty much everybody. It will emit its horrifying howl and start charging at a potential victim; then, when the victim hears/sees it and panics, it will get grossed out and turn around.

Unluckily, this happened so often that it became a default expectation. People would tell their children things like “the Grimmmeluch lies in wait on the path to the schoolhouse, but don’t worry, everyone knows that it pretends to to charge at you but will just run the other direction after you notice.” Finally, a few people reached the point where nothing the Grimmmeluch could do so much as made their heart start pounding a few bpm faster than normal - at which point the Grimmmeluch tore them limb from limb. Luckily, this was enough to rekindle fear in the rest of the population. Unluckily . . .

Some say that God created the Grimmmeluch to cull overconfident midwits from the gene pool. Certainly midwittery and overconfidence of all sorts have proliferated since it went extinct in 1842.