Screwtape

• Screwtape 14 May 2026 17:19 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: jchan’s comment on: “Com­mu­nity or­ga­nizer” is a dou­ble oxymoron

  The problem is when you get polarizing “scissor people” who are persistently banned by some organizers but not all; and/​or when organizers each ban each other from their respective events. This may seem unlikely, but I do believe it’ll eventually happen, and when it does it’ll consume a vastly disproportionate amount of the community’s attention to the detriment of its actual mission.

  I have watched that exact scenario happen. Having watched it, I prefer Boston Rationality’s setup for the general community case, with a cheerful norm of splintering if we ever need to.

  My read of your sequence here is you’re advocating for a specific community structure (the titular “guild”) and I actually really like it! I think guilds are underused in modern American society, and for its functioning the guild needs to have a singular ban list from guild activities.

  Two quibbles, then.

  First, there are going to be ambiguous guild activities that the ban list may not reach. It’s the church picnic organized in the field a quarter mile down the road from the church by members, or the unofficial convention afterparties the night after the con. The guild (in this case the church elders or the convention team) can’t actually ban people from those, and trying too hard will either fail (causing a bit of community backlash) or succeed (creating a new ambiguous edge of the guild, where the cycle repeats.)

  Second, the hard-schisms can be surprisingly porous! I think that’s a pretty ideal situation actually if you can mostly avoid forcing people to join the conflict if they don’t have to. One church becomes two, where likely the elders and pastors have strong feelings about the other but the congregation will have a lot of friends across the line. Ideally even the elders and pastors continue to be able to relate well; this can go well if the disagreement is acknowledged as an edge case. If you dig into the backchannel backstories of many a modern convention with a similar other convention in the same area, you’ll find a story like this.

  My current strategy for Boston Rationality is to head this off by making schisms as friendly and easy as possible. There’s a bunch of different announcement tools, there’s different styles of meetups. If it ever comes to a time when I think a ban is really important to make and my fellow local organizers think it’s important to not make, I want to let that schism happen with as little acrimonious fanfare as possible. As a short circuit, I keep on friendly terms with adjacent groups like Fractal and EA and some of this can be handled by someone e.g. getting banned from the ACX group but not the Fractal group or vice versa.

  (This is helped enormously of course by the fact that there isn’t a lot of hard value held by the group- friendly schisms get harder if there’s real estate involved!)

• Screwtape 14 May 2026 16:48 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jchan’s comment on: “Com­mu­nity or­ga­nizer” is a dou­ble oxymoron

  Here’s a concrete test: If someone is new to the group (i.e. they’ve been to only one or two meetups), is there a frictionless path for them to organize the very next meetup? Or by the time they realize this was an option, will they already have carved out a niche in the group as a “passive consumer”?

  I don’t think the path to organizing the very next meetup is frictionless, no. My guess at the fast path would be something like:

  • They attend one of the meetups in a public space, and get invited to the next. (The invitation was already open, this doesn’t change much.)

  • They attend a second meetup, and afterwards get the Attendee role in the discord and possibly invited to a couple of the very slightly filtered events e.g. the ones at people’s apartments.

  • Towards the end of the month, a bunch of us are chatting about ideas for next month’s meetups and what days are open. If they volunteer to run something, cool, they announce it and they’re on the schedule for next month. Lets say early next month.

  • They run the meetup, and afterwards get the Organizer role in the discord where there’s more active talk about coordinating for big events or balancing the mix of meetups.

  There’s a slower version where someone hangs around attending a bit longer (say, two or three months) before getting proffered organizer opportunities. That can look like me messaging them and saying ‘hey, I thought the idea for a discussion topic you mentioned sounded good- want to run something about that on the 14th?’ or can look like another organizer saying ‘hey you mentioned you’re further south than the rest of us- if you know any good venues, want to run the Wednesday board game meetup down near your part of town?’ or a few other variations. The general strategy is to gently poke people to be more active.

  At the point where a group has 14 “organizers” I would find the term rather meaningless, since becoming the 15th doesn’t have quite the ontological gravity as becoming the 2nd.

  I take the open source view of things; I want lots of contributors all with the repository on their local machine, so that if something happens to the other maintainers, any of those contributors could in theory fork it and keep the thing going. Or to use another community style as an example, the church I grew up in generally thought that each member of the congregation should, if necessary, be able to rebuild the faith with just themselves and a bible. If I can, I want to make Boston Rationality a community where every single person who has attended for more than a year has run an event in the last year. Fifteen organizers is only a good start!

• Screwtape 13 May 2026 18:16 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: “Com­mu­nity or­ga­nizer” is a dou­ble oxymoron

  I’m pleased to be so widely referenced! And I’ve been following these posts and appreciating them, I like the eye you’ve got for group structures.

  Having said that, I’m not going to disagree a bit XD I do agree with Brendan that your case sounds like you’ve distributed the organizer role, not removed it. This is the strategy both Melting Gold and Overthrow The Organizer Day are pointing at.

  For a case report: Around six months ago I switched tactics in Boston Rationality. Previously I’d been trying out lots of formats and activities for the individual meetups, treating myself as a reliable part of the system. Around September of last year, I made a plan to run a month of very easy meetups. (Board games at a pub, and chapter by chapter book discussions in an office building lobby.) I then told people I would be out of town all November, so other people would have to take up the torch. I pitched other meetup ideas and encouraged other people to pitch their meetup ideas. I made a little bit of fanfare when someone ran a meetup and gave them a special colour in the community discord.

  Today there’s fourteen people who have run a meetup (meaning they’re the ones who picked a time and place and announced it on the event channels) in the last year, and by tomorrow there’s going to be fifteen. Some do it more commonly than others, but it’s now totally normal to have a week where three different organizers are up to something. We’ve even established that bans are per-person-running-the-meetup; this does mean we’re going to have some obnoxious people show up for longer than would be ideal as different meetup runners ban them one by one, but in the other direction I don’t feel like this function is resting solely on me anymore.

  I call the people who pick a time and place and announce it and who know they can ban people they don’t want at their events “meetup organizers.” Boston Rationality has lost a little bit of my specific flavour of ambition focus, but we gained so much more from having lots and lots of organizers.

Board Games: Card Games

AI World-Model Building

Ra­tion­al­ist Fic­tion Read­ing Group

AI 2027 Midtrospective

Board Games: Ice­breaker Games

• Screwtape 30 Apr 2026 22:55 UTC

  5 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 of whether their boss is an enemy sympathizer, 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

  5 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

  15 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?”