Screwtape

• Screwtape 30 Apr 2026 22:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Every­one has a plan un­til they get lied to the face

  On the other hand, if you assume that someone is lying (in a competent way where you can’t easily identify what are the lies), that gives you… pretty much nothing to do. You’re treating their words as containing ~zero information, so you (1) can’t use them as an excuse to run some fun analyses/​projections, (2) can’t use them as an opportunity to socialize and show off.

  This is not quite true, though I do think treating their words as containing ~zero information is the correct first pass approach. There does exist a trickier response where their words give you some evidence for what they want you to believe, what they want others to have heard them say, or that the kind of person they imagine themselves to be would say that. Zvi’s Simulacra Levels may be useful here.

  Parsing people’s statements this way leaves me open to going off the rails and doing galaxy brained apophenia takes. I do think I have sometimes derived useful information from “They’re saying X. I don’t know if X is true or false. I do now know they want to have said X. What would they gain from having done that?” I try to be pretty precise in what I think I know and why I think I know that when trying moves like this.

  (For a blatant and fictional example, imagine that you are a member of the tyrannical regime’s enforcers, and Bella, who you happen to know lies a lot, comes to you and says her boss is secretly an enemy sympathizer. Without any idea if that’s true or false, you now have a good guess that Bella would like bad things to happen to her boss. Their words had no relation to the object level truth, but still had information for you.)

• Screwtape 28 Apr 2026 18:08 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: Screw­tape’s Shortform

  

  Today this was the top of my LW feed. (I have a bunch of tag filtering so I wouldn’t expect your feeds to look like this.)

  The lineup is pretty funny to have in order though.

• Screwtape 22 Apr 2026 18:09 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jchan’s comment on: Call for machers

  Not quite the same thing, but you may find meetups in a box of interest. (I’m tickled by your list of action items—I run East Coast Rationalist Megameetup and the Rationality Meetups discord, and all three had more energy put into them when I had more energy for Rationalist meetup maching.)

Bos­ton, USA—ACX Spring Schel­ling 2026

In­tro­duc­ing The Screw­tape Ladders

• Screwtape 1 Apr 2026 18:12 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Less­wrong Liberated

  An Unbiased Proposal

  LessWrong should give more attention and focus to the important things about rationality and the places where people really improve how they think about the world.

• Screwtape 1 Apr 2026 15:06 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Less­wrong Liberated

  LessStarCodex

  Taking inspiration from the acknowledged greatest rationalist blog, this simple design makes it easy to look through what’s been posted.

• Screwtape 30 Mar 2026 16:13 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Sean Aubin’s comment on: Dou­ble Crux In A Box

  Thank you for the feedback! It’s a good note to hear about what happened with the groups, especially since I’ve been testing a 3-person meetup format somewhat like this.

  I’m curious if you used the questions on Jenn’s printout? One open question I have is whether a group would need to keep finding new topics to argue about (limiting the low-effort repeatable part) or if that’s not an issue.

• Screwtape 21 Mar 2026 16:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist Prac­tice Dojo

  Heads up, the location changed!

• Screwtape 19 Mar 2026 16:12 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Screw­tape’s Shortform

  I don’t think so but possibly. Subtweeting is when you’re talking about a specific person indirectly, right? I have run into enough of these that I think of them as a type of person, like people who blare music on the subway and people who smoke in the non-smoking section.

  (Fewer of them volunteer to run the equivalent of coin-flipping tournaments and there’s selection effects on who I’d run into, but even still it feels like too many of them do that too!)

• Screwtape 16 Mar 2026 20:59 UTC

  14 points

  4

  on: Screw­tape’s Shortform

  “You know the kinda guy who flips fifteen coins, gets seven heads, tells you he flipped ten coins^[1], claims he got eight heads, then when someone digs into it and points out one of those heads was actually a tails he makes you prove it exhaustively before admitting maybe he said one false thing but jeez why are you so invested in every single mistake he makes?”

  ″. . . no, I don’t think I know anyone like that. Why do you ask?”

  “He just volunteered to run a competitive coin-flipping tournament.”

  1. ^

     Technically true! He did flip ten coins! He just flipped five more he didn’t mention.

• Screwtape 16 Mar 2026 16:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jotto999’s comment on: Every­one has a plan un­til they get lied to the face

  That paragraph is arguing punching people in the face is a bad idea for the puncher. Getting punched in the face is also bad, yes, and for the more empathetic and altruistic among us the pain and potential long-term damage of the punchee might also matter.

  There’s something about how dumb it is for the puncher that adds to the incredulity for me, and thereby sometimes got the puncher an extra second or two. Continuing the analogy, I have sometimes gone ”. . . that would be such a stupid lie to tell. It’d be easy to check. It’d be so clearly a mistake for them to lie about it. What just happened?”

Ba­sics of Ra­tion­al­ist Discourse

Ra­tion­al­ist Prac­tice Dojo

In­tro to Glowficcing

Board Games: Max Games Edition

• Screwtape 20 Feb 2026 22:47 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ist Ham­let Reading

  Me too! Curious and excited, I’m a fan of the play : )

• Screwtape 6 Feb 2026 6:34 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: The im­pos­si­ble prob­lem of due process

  I’ve had this on my to-review log all review season, and I guess I’m getting this in mere hours before it closes.

  What does this post add to the conversation?

  The most important piece I think this adds is that the problem is not simple.

  I keep seeing people run into one of these community conflict issues, and propose simple and reasonable sounding ways to solve it. I do not currently believe the issue is impossible, but it’s not as simple as some folks think when they stare at it the first time.

  How did this post affect you, your thinking, and your actions?

  Context: For a time, Mingyuan’s role involved overseeing the global Astral Codex Ten community, particularly the in-person parts. When she resigned from that position, I’m the one who took it up. I got to see a version of this post before it went live, shortly after I took up the role.

  According to her, more than 50% of the reason she stepped down was she became entangled in community conflicts. When you are something like a month into a new role and your predecessor hands you a document saying a problem is impossible and it also caused her to resign, and you already have a fresh instance of the problem in your inbox? That tends to affect you, your thinking, and your actions.

  Does it make accurate claims? Does it carve reality at the joints? How do you know? /​ Is there a subclaim of this post that you can test?

  Well, I haven’t stepped down because of becoming entangled in community conflict yet. This kind of thing is in the top three most likely reasons I step down if I do someday resign though. (Citation, my my own self evaluation.)

  Do investigations eat up hundreds of person-hours? Yep, they totally can if you let them. Skill and practice and a willingness to triage can cut that down a lot.

  Do panels generally have much real ability to enforce things? Here I half disagree. The rationality community in particular is fuzzy and amorphous, without a clear single roster or doorway. In that situation, the panel can’t enforce things. More structured communities- including sub-communities within the rationalist community- can potentially give panels enforcement ability. The LessWrong site itself, the r/​rational discord, or an organization and venue space like Mox can delegate a ban decision to a panel and enforce that. That said, this requires the panel being granted this capability, and for the enforcing entity to carry it out.

  If you just try and convene a panel mid-conflict, and it doesn’t have a scope or actual authority to do stuff (“actual authority” being, they’ve got the ban command on the forum, or keys to the dormitory, or the people who do will likely follow the panel’s advisement, or something like that) then yeah they’re not going to have much ability to enforce anything.

  Do panels act like they are courts of law? Unclear. The ones I’m most familiar with had literal lawyers on them, though not in a professional capacity. I think a little of this is that the panel is trying to have some higher standard of evidence, but also that trust isn’t transitive; it’s just much easier for me to feel confident in what I experienced than it is for a panel to feel confident that I’m relaying my experience accurately.

  Do panels often lack a secure sense of legitimacy? Unclear, I’m not in their heads. I do think that giving a panel a clear scope is very useful.

  Do favourable rulings lend legitimacy to bad actors? Yep, and more than you’d think. It’s just a very straightforward move if you’re a bad actor who a panel has investigated and deemed fine to bring up that fact as often as it seems helpful. It may be a useful intuition pump to picture some social deception game where an ability can detect what team someone’s on, which has somehow been spoofed or misread. One thing that caught me by surprise is that the rulings don’t even need to be straightforwardly favourable: I’ve seen mixed rulings be quoted in ways I consider pretty out of context.

  Are extended investigations stressful for all parties involved? Unclear, I’m not in their heads, but people do keep saying this is true.

  Is there often no way to find the objective truth? Yes, at least no reasonable way. One relevant skill is sifting through various claims and noticing which ones would be potentially provable. And unmentioned here is how often no one particular objective truth is significant.

  What followup work would you like to see building on this post?

  I’ve been trying!

  Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent is my single best followup, if I had to pick one. I really wish I’d written up more of what I learned from other communities. The rationality community is odd in many ways, but there are things we can learn. Sci-fi conventions, service non-profits, sports leagues, community colleges, martial arts dojos, small churches, all of these groups and more have lessons for us in how to manage and respond to incidents.

  If you’re part of a community with a process for incident response, I’d be grateful if you’d write up how that works. You don’t need to give details on any specific incidents; just walking through the steps that would get taken for a couple hypotheticals, and who would handle each part, is useful for comparison.

  So, what to vote?

  It’s a good essay. It’s going in my collection of things people should read if they’re interested in the topic. It’s relevant to LessWrongers, and it’s relevant to most communities at least as a theory. It’s spot on relevant for my sub-special interest of the last year.

  For all that, I personally gave it a +1. I can see a pretty clear argument for +4 and might change my mind. It’s a bit more niche than I’d want for +4, I think it’s coming from a place of (empathized with) frustration and I wish it had some more actionable moves or improvements to offer.

• Screwtape 29 Jan 2026 23:42 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Anna Eplin’s comment on: Anna Eplin’s Shortform

  A question I have been asking since before starting work with Raemon on this, which is only more relevant now:

  What rationality skill(s) do you think is most important? Put another way, if we could snap our fingers and teach some rationality skill as broadly as literacy currently gets taught, what skill should we pick?

  (I don’t think this is Raemon’s angle on the project but it is kind of mine.)

• Screwtape 29 Jan 2026 23:14 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: george_adams’s comment on: Anna Eplin’s Shortform

  I would lightly argue scope insensitivity (and calibration!) are both traditional rationalist topics. Incomplete, yes, but I think they’re both well served by quantified intuitions and they’d be part of my ideal rationalist training program.