Screwtape

• Screwtape 4 Apr 2024 18:15 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Ali­cante – ACX Mee­tups Every­where Spring 2024

  Update: Will has informed me that they won’t be able to be there. If anyone else wants to pick up Alicante or meet there in the absence of an organizer they can.

Cam­bridge—ACX Mee­tups Every­where Spring 2024

• Screwtape 2 Apr 2024 1:56 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Screw­tape’s Shortform

  Usage of ChatGPT/​Dall-E I did not think about until I had the idea to try it- in the middle of a tabletop RPG session, pulling out my phone, describing the scene in a couple of quick sentences, and then showing the phone and the resulting picture to the players without breaking my pacing.

  Anyway, the current results of music AI make me suspicious the next time I play a bard I might be able to come up with new songs mid session.

• Screwtape 1 Apr 2024 17:41 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”

  If you were not previously aware of it, you might want to give this a listen. I suggest Hymn To Breaking Strain and When I Die.

• Screwtape 1 Apr 2024 17:39 UTC

  7 points

  3

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”

  I feel like it should be a Gregorian chant. C’mon, it’s in Latin already!

• Screwtape 1 Apr 2024 15:35 UTC

  7 points

  6

  on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”

  Thank you for making me laugh today.

  More Dakka is unironically going on my energy boost playlist, and I’m tempted to try getting Litany of Tarrrrrski into a solstice. That’s above and beyond though, this was fun to listen to and I’m grateful to whoever put it together.

Burling­ton – ACX Mee­tups Every­where Spring 2024

Run­ning a Ba­sic ACX Every­where Meetup

As Many Ideas

• Screwtape 22 Mar 2024 17:32 UTC

  7 points

  0

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

  • English is liberal and ambiguous with possessives. “My hat” is fine, “my spouse” I guess works but I’d rather not, “my country” seems wrong to me. I have all the decision making authority for the hat, I have next to none about the country. Proposal: that there are different words denoting “ownership of” and “associated with.”

• Screwtape 15 Mar 2024 21:37 UTC

  2 points

  0

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

  • “Listened to” has an interesting ambiguity in English. Consider the sentence “I listen to the people” or “Me and George don’t think you’re listening to us.” It can mean “heard the words of.” I listened to a radio talk show on how to fix a car’s broken fan belt. It can mean “done what those words said.” I listened to my theatre director’s coaching on where to stand during the show. Proposal: Two short phrases which mean one of those two things, and no short phrases that are ambiguous.

• Screwtape 11 Mar 2024 3:28 UTC

  2 points

  0

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

  • “will” is supposedly supposed to be interpreted as a statement of fact, but colloquially isn’t especially when it’s a contraction. “I’ll grab eggs from the store later tonight” is not normally read as a deep and abiding commitment to obtain eggs come hell or high water, but that’s sort of what a literal reading of the sentence should mean? Proposal: That the contraction form of “will” indicate an intention or light commitment.

• Screwtape 10 Mar 2024 23:20 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: Screw­tape’s Shortform

  A bullet point from an unsorted list of complaints I have against the English language. (And I think most languages.)

  • “I think” is an annoying extra three syllables, and should be stuck on the front of almost everything I saw. “[I think] we have apples at home.” “[I think] we take a left turn here.” This adds a lot of extra clunk to talking properly with rationalists where I want to be careful and precise in my speech. Proposal: That the normal and unmodified sentence assumes the “I think” and you instead prefix “It is a fact” or something similar when you’re making a stronger claim.

Map­ping the Territory

• Screwtape 7 Mar 2024 17:31 UTC

  5 points

  −1

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Es­say­ing Other Plans

  The following works for me. I do not know how well it works for other people.

  I separate coming up with ideas and filtering for good ideas. Many of the ideas I come up with are bad ideas. For example, I’m about to spend a few minutes by the clock coming up with plans for becoming a professional film director.

  “Go to film school and ask the professors for professional contacts. Show up at a college office hour and as the professors for contacts even if I’m not a student. Make movies in my backyard with home equipment, and put them online. Reach out to film studios and ask if they have educational opportunities or internships. Hire a professional film director to tutor me. Read books and biographies about professional film directors and copy what they did. Hang around the next actor’s strike and ask if anyone wants to goof off and do an amateur project that wouldn’t break the strike. Make movies and then talk to local theatres and see if they want to run those movies, maybe during slow times/​days. Create an online buzz around an obscure and rarely seen auteur film that The Mainstream Media doesn’t want you to see. Project it onto the sky on a screen held up by drones. Make a film of a famous fanfic- hey, podfics hitch a ride on someone else’s story why not a film.”

  Okay, time over. Some of those ideas need more detail- like, making a movie with the tools I have comes up as a first step of several plans and I’d need to work through more about how to do that. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I know just enough about film-making to know there’s some different choices I’d make while filming depending on the eventual format but maybe I can save some effort with multiple cuts or something. Other ideas are ways to fish for more ideas, like reading books on the subject or asking professors what to do.

  Some are just bad ideas. Getting professional film directors to tutor me sounds expensive, and also I’m not at all sure the constraint is lack of skill at directing. Actor’s strikes seem to happen about every ten years so maybe keep that in your back pocket while you work on other plans. As for projecting it onto the sky, I don’t have any idea how that gets you paid enough to get called a professional plus you might get some kind of public disturbance complaint? But. . . talking to local theatres doesn’t seem like a terrible idea? Putting some kind of weird spin on a movie released online might work- it at least points at different tweaks or implementations to just putting it up on Youtube.

  The point is, I didn’t come up with those plans to fill a quota. I was just coming up with a bunch of ideas. If in the end there was only one good idea in the mix, then I’d use that one and ignore the others. Sometimes there’s no good ideas, in which case I give my brain a mental cookie for coming up with ideas and another for not pretending that any of them were good.

• Screwtape 7 Mar 2024 17:01 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Jacob G-W’s comment on: Es­say­ing Other Plans

  You’re welcome, and thank you for the example! As you point out, whether you’re constrained on time often matters for how many plans you can attempt.

  I do hope you give yourself some points for noticing the first method wasn’t working and switching. That’s better than winding up with no data. I’d encourage thinking of this as an opportunity to get even more points.

Es­say­ing Other Plans

• Screwtape 26 Feb 2024 19:13 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: The Pareto Best and the Curse of Doom

  Fair. In my head, “Curse of doom” is generic but attaches to “Pareto Best.” There are many curses, here’s one. I didn’t manage to come up with a name for it that I loved, so I went with something that felt okay. Curse of Dimensionality is more specific but I feel like it doesn’t get at the idea enough to feel useful? Alternate titles:

  • Curse of Doom

  • Curse of Dimensionality

  • Curse of Options

  • Curse of Overlap

  • Pareto’s Curse

  • Pareto Gaps

  • Gap of Good Skill

  • Empty Frontiers

  It does feel curse like to me but that’s more poetry than precision.

• Screwtape 23 Feb 2024 23:19 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: numpyNaN’s comment on: The Pareto Best and the Curse of Doom

  Yep, as I said in the parenthetical, the model is incorrect. I’m >95% sure that some people are twice as competent as other people and wouldn’t be surprised to encounter 10x gaps or higher if we’re allowed to pick from outliers in both directions.

  Finding an extreme polymath is a good trick if you can do it. Sometimes you can do it.

• Screwtape 23 Feb 2024 21:42 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: The Pareto Best and the Curse of Doom

  Three categories; there’s things that aren’t at all cursed because they only take one skillset or because their overlapping skillset is common, things that are a bit cursed where we have cases where the overlapping skillsets happened to work out but we have reason to expect there should be more, and things that are very cursed indeed. Note that, especially when looking at the difference between “Not at all cursed” and “a bit cursed” you’re

  Not at all cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a writer or playwright. (Tick Tick Boom, Bells are Ringing, Birds of Paradise, Cabaret, City of Angels, Merrily We Roll Along...) Software that fixes problems encountered by software engineers. (Git, Leetcode, JIRA, Stack Exchange, and that’s not counting this list of IDEs.) Legal or bureaucrat collective organizations that have done their paperwork. (See this list of bar associations just for Massachusetts.)

  A bit cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a U.S. president. (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Hamilton, arguably 1776.) Computer programs about doing your taxes. (H&R, TurboTax.) Rationalist or EA organizations that have done their paperwork (see this post and ctrl+f for “king umbrella”) or to pick another example with a larger population, software engineering associations that have done their paperwork.

  Very cursed: Musicals or plays about being illiterate. Computer programs about Amish farming techniques. Anarchist organizations that have done their paperwork.

  Note that a Very Cursed section I write might have some hits, mainly when it winds up being worth paying someone. It’s hard to write a list of the things nobody thought to make, since obviously nobody thought to make them. Someone who had no knowledge of how the internet worked would have a hard time realizing that Google Docs or Amazon’s online shopping would be options someone might try. It might be a better intuition pump to look at the gradient between Not At All Cursed and A Bit Cursed; what’s the difference between lawyers and software engineers that makes it so lawyers have a dozen bar associations in MA, with their own bylaws and articles? The hypothesis I’m putting forward is that being a lawyer selects hard for being comfortable with paperwork, while being a software engineer doesn’t select for that at all.

  Or to reuse one of the examples I had in the main article: A book about an unappreciated writer or English teacher is a cliche. A book about an unappreciated janitor or waste collector is not a cliche. My hypothesis is this is because being a writer selects for writing ability, while being a janitor doesn’t.