• A jwz.org blog post on “Sexbot Ethics” triggered debate about whether a software-defined consent flag (e.g., `#define CONSENT 1`) can satisfy moral agency, underscoring the gap between deterministic code and human notions of consent.

• Participants re-examined a 2012 log warning against “listening to yourself” (internal monologue), leading FourFire to hypothesize that self-narration may impose a measurable cognitive load and to announce an upcoming ADHD evaluation and medication experiment.

• kanzure half-seriously proposed resurrecting John von Neumann as the ideal scientific leader; FourFire followed up by asking whether von Neumann’s DNA could be recovered from graves or living descendants, treating literal genetic revival as a governance strategy.

• A detailed critique of peer review framed the current system as an opaque gift economy that exploits unpaid academic labor; the group explored replacing it with a transparent “merit-point” or “review-credit” scheme that only committed researchers would value, aiming to deter trolls and reduce publisher capture.

• cluckj emphasized that today’s peer-review credits are undocumented and non-transferable, while fenn argued that the immediate priority is simply to introduce any form of explicit reward where none presently exists.