Screwtape

Karma: 7,574

I’m Screwtape, also known as Skyler. I’m an aspiring rationalist originally introduced to the community through HPMoR, and I stayed around because the writers here kept improving how I thought. I’m fond of the Rationality As A Martial Art metaphor, new mental tools to make my life better, and meeting people who are strange in ways I find familiar and comfortable. If you’re ever in the Boston area, feel free to say hi.

Starting early in 2023, I’m the ACX Meetups Czar. You might also know me from the New York City Rationalist Megameetup, editing the Animorphs: The Reckoning podfic, or being that guy at meetups with a bright bandanna who gets really excited when people bring up indie tabletop roleplaying games.

I recognize that last description might fit more than one person.

Screwtape 9 Dec 2025 4:29 UTC
7 points
0
on: Anvil Problems
Self review:
Looking back, I’m still decently proud of this one. It’s a useful concept that shows up across disciplines, a bit abstract but with a plethora of examples. It’s kind of hard to “test” in some empirical way, mostly just keep it in your back pocket. You’re not going to be worse off for having the idea in your toolkit, but most people aren’t in a situation where it’s crucial.
The Anvil Shortage idea sticks around because I do think about what kinds of resources are harder to get more of once you run out vs if you start trying earlier. Probably the most practical is money; if you have no money, you can’t buy nice clothes or a regular home address and getting a job is very hard. If you have some money, you can present like a working professional, but you are on a timeline before you need your next job. If you have lots of money, you can wait for a really good job.
Now, most people didn’t need this post to tell them that, but I think that’s pretty typical. The everyday, practical application people have picked up from conversations with others or advice from their parents. Its the generalization that needs a bit more advice for, and a few people miss the metis and need to learn from essays on the internet.
For a Best Of list, I’d call this serviceable but replaceable.

Screwtape 8 Dec 2025 22:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
Typos fixed.
Intent in spoilers
I’m retrying the cambist booking values test from last year, but with consistent phrasing. I don’t need any one question to be comparable—it’s fine if each person thinks of a different sports car. I need the cycle to be comparable—so for each individual person to think of the same sportscar between questions. Likewise with how much they like their job. I think self consistent values are one of the load bearing pieces of rationality—it shows up in things like scope insensitivity, or taboo tradeoffs, or expected value calculations.

Screwtape 8 Dec 2025 20:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cata’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
Huh, I think it mostly works depending on the question. For some it gives a very wide range (“What year was the US declaration of independence signed?” gives you anywhere from 1600 to 1950!) but for others that seems a tricky range. Is your complaint that it’s too easy, or that the math is weird?

Screwtape 8 Dec 2025 20:16 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
I had some last year (ctrl+f for “llm frequency” and keep reading) and this year they fell victim to the culling of questions. I got some advice this year from someone who does a lot more surveys than I do that 70 questions is really the upper end of what you want to ask, and I uh, failed to cut things down to just 70.

Screwtape 8 Dec 2025 2:04 UTC
5 points
2
on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
This is the collector comment to collect problems with the census. If there’s a typo, a confusing question, anything like that, reply here.

2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey

Screwtape7 Dec 2025 22:08 UTC

45 points

22 comments1 min readLW link

Screwtape 7 Dec 2025 6:43 UTC
5 points
−1
on: I Need Your Help
For a course:
The Guild of the Rose has a bunch of workshops and a skill tree that may be of some use. There also exists the CFAR handbook, though I believe it’s formatted on the assumption that it’s an aid for a class with a teacher who knows what they’re doing. I’m also interested in this problem, and so there’s bits and pieces of useful stuff scattered throughout Meetup In A Box in the form of games or activities.
For universities or professors:
It would help to hear a bit more about your goal and use case for them. If you’re trying to get a class or club going, it’ll help a lot if it’s a teacher in a university you’re attending or plausibly would attend. If you’re looking for classroom material to copy from, you might start with some psych classes; I think a lot of biases get covered there. A bit of statistics or the right probability textbook would also help. If you’re looking for help learning the skill of teaching, just about any university will have some advice- it’s remarkably transferable. In particular I’d pay attention to public speaking (try toastmasters?) and technical writing classes.
For general advice:
I think it’s really useful to have some kind of concrete measurable thing in mind. Start with, say, calibration training and mess around with what helps people get better scores there. You’ll be able to notice what works and doesn’t work easier since you have a cleaner signal on what works and doesn’t.
I also think it’s generally easier to meet people where they’re at. Minimize the number of interim steps and inferential distance to cross, make it as fun and engaging as possible without losing the important core, pay attention to every point of friction and try to minimize or eliminate it. More people read books or watch Youtube videos than read sprawling sequences of blog posts, and now we have Scout Mindset and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Rational Animations and Robert Miles AI. If I could get a core package of rationality training into high schools I’d jump at that.
That’s not observably a majority opinion though.
Best of luck and skill. You’re not alone working on the problem.

Screwtape 6 Dec 2025 20:27 UTC
6 points
−2
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: shortest goddamn bayes guide ever
It’s not the programming notation that makes it work for me (though that helps a little.) It’s not the particular example either, though I do think it’s a bit better than the abstract mammogram example. There’s just way fewer numbers.
It’s because the notation on each line contains two numbers, both of which are. . . primitives? atomic pieces? I can do them in one step. (My inner monologue goes something like “3:2 means the the first thing happens three times for every two times the second thing happens, over the long run anyway. There’s five balls in the bag, three of the first colour and two of the second. Now more balls than that, but keep the ratio.”)
And then if I want to do an update, I just need four numbers, each of which makes sense on their own, each of which is used in one place. 1:100, 20:50, multiply the left by the left (20) and the right by the right (5000) and now I have two numbers again. (20:5000) I can usually simplify that in my head (2:500, okay now 1:250.) The line “The colon is a thick & rubbery barrier. Yep with yep and nope with nope” helps a lot, I’m reminded to keep all the yeps on the left and the nopes on the right. Because multiplication is transitive, I can just keep doing that at each new update, never dealing with more than four numbers. If I’d rather (or if I’m using pen and paper) I can just write out a dozen updates and get the products after.
Compare this sucker:
Four numbers used in six places. I’ll be the village idiot and admit I cannot reliably keep a phone number in my head without mental tricks. I have lost count of the number of times I have swapped P(A|B) and P(B|A) accidentally. The numbers aren’t arranged on the page in a way that helps my intuition, like yeps being on top and nopes on the bottom or something.
Or compare the explanation at the first link you shared.
Bayes’ rule in the odds form says that for every pair of hypotheses, their relative prior odds, times the relative likelihood of the evidence, equals the relative posterior odds.
Let $H$ be a vector of hypotheses $H_{1}, H_{2}, \dots$ Because Bayes’ rule holds between every pair of hypotheses in $H,$ we can simply multiply an odds vector by a likelihood vector in order to get the correct posterior vector:
$O (H) \times L_{e} (H) = O (H ∣ e)$
where $O (H)$ is the vector of relative prior odds between all the $H_{i}$ , $L_{e} (H)$ is the vector of relative likelihoods with which each $H_{i}$ predicted $e,$ and $O (H ∣ e)$ is the relative posterior odds between all the $H_{i} .$
In fact, we can keep multiplying by likelihood vectors to perform multiple updates at once:
$\begin{matrix} O (H) \times L_{e_{1}} (H) \times L_{e_{2}} (H \land e_{1}) \times L_{e_{3}} (H \land e_{1} \land e_{2}) = O (H ∣ e_{1} \land e_{2} \land e_{3}) \end{matrix}$
I am trying to express I find that more complicated. I don’t know what $L_{e}$ means. It took me a bit to remember what $O$ stands for. If you are ever trying to explain something to the general population and you need LaTeX to do it, stop what you are doing and come up with a new plan. Seven paragraphs into that page we get the odds form with the colon, and it’s for three different hypothesis; I’m aware you can write odds like 3:2:4 but that’s less common. Drunk people who flunked high school routinely calculate 3:2 in pubs! Start with the two hypothesis version, then maybe mention that you can do three hypotheses at once. “Shortest Goddamn Bayes Guide Ever” uses strictly symbols on a standard keyboard and math which is within the limits of an on-track fourth grader. It’s less than two hundred words! The thing would fit in three tweets!
I think that is a masterwork of pedagogy and editing, worthy of praise and prominent place.
If there’s a way to make this version work for non-naive updates that seems good, and my understanding is it’s mostly about saying for each new line “given that the above has happened, what are the odds of this observation?” instead of “what are the odds of this observation assuming I haven’t seen the above”? It’s not like the P(A|B) formulation prevents people from making that exact mistake. (Citation, I have made that exact mistake.)

Screwtape 6 Dec 2025 7:00 UTC
8 points
3
on: shortest goddamn bayes guide ever
Kicks open the door
Alright, here’s the current state of affairs:
- Premise: Bayes Theorem is held up as the most important part of rationality. ACX has the tagline “P(A|B) = [P(A)P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.” Yudkowsky mentions it approximately a million times in the Sequences.
- Premise: The average rationalist cannot use Bayes theorem. No, I will be stronger and more specific: when I ask a room full of people at a LessWrong meetup whether they can write the formula for Bayes Theorem on a piece of paper, less than half of them can.
- Conclusion: Less than half of the rationalist community understands the most important part of rationality.
Or in other words, we suck. Lest anyone think I’m merely throwing stones, I screwed up Bayes the first time I tried to use it in public. I would not bet a lot on me getting any particular problem right. I suck too.
This version though? This I think most people could remember. I can do this version in my head. I’ve read a half-dozen explainers for Bayes, some with very nice pictures. This beats all of them, and it’s in less than two hundred words! Maybe this is a case of Writing A Thousand Roads To Rome where this version happened to click with me but it’s fundamentally just as good as many other versions. I suspect this is a simpler formulation.
Either someone needs to point out where this math is wrong, or I’m just going to use this version for myself and for explaining it to others. A much simpler version of the only non-commentary part of rationality seems a worthy use of Best of LessWrong space to me.

Screwtape 6 Dec 2025 0:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Slippin Fall’s comment on: Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill
Isn’t learning to gracefully deal with “rude” comments/people just as important a skill as learning to not emit rude comments?
Yeah, but it’s generally not the same people who need the other lesson!

Screwtape 6 Dec 2025 0:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: River’s comment on: Change My Mind: The Rationalist Community is a Gift Economy
I’m thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example.
Yep, I think there’s central examples of theft (breaking into someone’s house and taking cash out of their wallet), less central examples of theft that are still widely agreed upon to be theft (taking someone’s money claiming it’s being safeguarded on a trading exchange when actually some of customer funds pay for a bahamas office.)
And what I’m trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.
As long as they’re clearly and honestly labeled I disagree, would expect >=7 out of 10 random Americans would also disagree, and though I think you’ve got the law background and I don’t I would expect a court to disagree. Maybe I’m not modeling exactly how social pressure works here?
Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don’t think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat.
I am pretty sure (85%) that airplanes do other price discrimination than just seat size. How early the ticket is being booked, how I’m planning to pay for it, whether I often fly with that airplane. I believe they also do a bit of dynamic pricing based on IP address, which is a sneaky way to guess at how much the customer is willing to pay. It annoys me a bit, but as long as they show the price when I’m buying the ticket and honour that price I wouldn’t call it stealing.
In the context of organizing a community event, I don’t think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don’t see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don’t know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don’t think it’s shameful. I’m pretty cheerful in both gift economies and market economies. I don’t want to accidentally interact with one like it’s the other, so sometimes I ask in various ways what mode we’re all in. I’d feel bad if I took advantage of someone’s gift to make a bunch of money, and I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money, and so I try to be up front about what I’m doing under which hat. Edit: Eh, “I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money” is a generalization, not true in every particular.
(I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket).
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the update.
But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.
My point is that if the musicians and organizers and speakers are all volunteering, there’s at gift being given as well as product being marketed.

Screwtape 5 Dec 2025 23:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: River’s comment on: Change My Mind: The Rationalist Community is a Gift Economy
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that..
Yep, I’m making a frictionless vacuum spherical cow example.
My guess is the bay solstice organizers aren’t sending a tax deduction because the obvious-on-first-pass setup is to set things up like people are buying tickets, but I guess it’s plausible the underlying organization is a nonprofit? I know a few SF/F cons that I think have a track for larger donations to count as tax deductible.

Screwtape 5 Dec 2025 23:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: The 2024 LessWrong Review
Confirming, I used the Submit Linkpost tab then Import Post

Screwtape 5 Dec 2025 18:57 UTC
4 points
0
on: The 2024 LessWrong Review
How does crossposting something to nominate work? I tried with Thresholding and the system is tracking its date as the date I crossposted, not the date of the original. Reasonable but not great for my purposes. Is there something I’m supposed to do?

Screwtape 4 Dec 2025 6:24 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: AugBro’s comment on: Open Thread Winter 2025/26
Hello and welcome! There’s a few of us around who discuss things other than AI research, myself among them. I suggest looking at the filtering options for the front page; it’s the gear next to Latest, Enriched, Recommended, and Bookmarks. I filter the AI tag pretty heavily down.
If you want to lean into voicing fringe ideas around here, I’d suggest reading the LessWrong Political Prerequisites and maybe Basics of Rationalist Discourse. They’re not universally agreed upon, but I think they do make for a decent pointer to the local standards.

Board Games!

Screwtape4 Dec 2025 4:55 UTC

9 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

Screwtape 3 Dec 2025 19:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Stream of Consciousness as a Scaffolding Skill
None of the essays I publish got written via stream of consciousness, though sometimes I do it to get ideas or to debug what I think is going wrong with a piece.
Probably some authors are working in a genre where that works for them, or have such a well ordered stream that they can publish what comes out. (hi Scott.) I’m not one of ’em though :)

Screwtape 3 Dec 2025 5:14 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: River’s comment on: Change My Mind: The Rationalist Community is a Gift Economy
I think I’ve got substantial disagreement, but I want to agree that in general I think a ‘pay your share’ ticket is a good default. My one line advice on ticket pricing is something like “first add up the costs of venue, food, equipment, etc, second divide that by the number of people you expect to attend, third add 10% for your planning fallacy, and that’s your one ticket price.” If I get more lines of advice I add more of course.
I empathize a lot with wanting to be able to just pay ones fair portion of something. There also are some real horror stories of groups trying to pry more money loose from their memberships.
Still, substantial disagreements below:
This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy—one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people.
(emphasis mine.)
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla’s house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like “you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert” and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that’s not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That’s still true even through at least ‘normal’^[1] amounts of price discrimination. Dean could offer front row seats for a higher price than the nosebleed section, that seems fine. He could explicitly use student status, asking for student ID or a .edu email, and in a high-trust environment it seems mostly fine to just use the honour system. Seems reasonable.
That’s still true even if community membership was contingent on paying, which it’s not. Off the top of my head, Toastmasters and Rotary Club both have mandatory membership dues to be at a local chapter, every Friday Night Magic I’ve been to had an entrance fee of some kind, and the first choir that came to my mind has membership dues. (They even explicitly do variable options: ctrl+f for “Member dues are a core part of BCE’s budget”.)
I believe it is not an attempt at stealing anything and it is not dishonest to do price discrimination where you say upfront what the price points are and let people decide whether to pay or not.
It can also come off as a bit stealy—like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share.
Speaking as one of the organizers who sometimes runs stuff without a clear pay-your-way price point (though the breakeven price point with a bit of margin is my default these days), I don’t think I’m entitled to this in the current model, and if you want the market economy answer I think the arrow flips around. Like, I don’t get paid out of hypothetical profits for East Coast Rationalist Megameetup or Boston Solstice.^[2] In the market economy version of ECRM, I’d add my expected time investment as a cost, and also I’d add more margin because I’d want to make a profit.
Take airplane seats as an example; it seems like a category error of some kind to say ‘United Airlines thinks they’re entitled to more money from the highly paid professionals than is their fair share.’ United Airlines wants as much of my money as they can get me to pay, I want them to fly me around for as little as I can pay. In a market economy they figure out how much they want to offer tickets at, I decide whether to buy from them or Delta or whether I want to call them up and try to negotiate with their representative or whether I want to stay home. They’re probably not going to sell me a ticket for less than the opportunity cost of selling my seat to someone else. They very likely aren’t going to sell me a ticket for less than the marginal cost of my weight^[3] but from a market economy perspective, the fair price isn’t the marginal cost of all the passenger’s collective seats, it’s the price point where supply and demand curves cross.
There do exist rationalist (or at least adjacent) events that get run like this, paying organizers and/or staff for their time and charging enough that there’s a decent return on investment. I want to be careful about using non-public information here, so I’ll stop for the moment at just saying they exist, they’re great, and also they’re a minority.
I mildly think the $35 ticket for California Bay Solstice is not actually a market price. I don’t have any inside information on the budget for Berkeley Solstice, but I could ask and I’d be pretty surprised (p(5%)) if everyone paying $35 means that the musicians and organizers all get paid market rate for their time, or pays for the afterparty food and venue and ops time. I hear they sold out last year; in a market, if you sell out all copies, the obvious thing is to keep raising prices until that stops happening.
1. ^
  “Normal” is not well defined here and I don’t expect I could give a good principled definition without working on it for a while.
2. ^
  In the past, the net profit got paid forward to the next year. It did rest on my accounts for the year and I didn’t account for interest earned; I would have if I thought it’d be more money than the cost of my time take to track the interest.
3. ^
  Though they might if they have some clever reason, like they think it’ll make me a more loyal customer and that’s worth it? But afaik the actual marginal cost of an extra ~200lbs of flesh blood and luggage is way cheaper than any airline ticket I’ll ever buy.

Screwtape 3 Dec 2025 3:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: River’s comment on: Change My Mind: The Rationalist Community is a Gift Economy
I have more substantial disagreement, but I want to do a quick check;
I think it is fine for the organizers to include in that price things like informal financial aid (the subsidizing of the lower tear tickets),...
This seemed to me like one of the central examples of things you were against. Was I misreading?
If the cost (that is, the at-cost price of the venue space, food, etc) of an event is $50 per person, and the audience is totally bimodal (there’s fifty students who can only afford $25, and fifty SWEs making $500k a year) do you think it’s fine to have a student ticket for $25 and a SWE ticket for $75, with the SWEs cross-subsidizing the students?
(By my read you’d prefer there be three tickets; a $25, a $50, and a $75. I’m asking if you’d be fine with the subsidy in the two-ticket example.)

Effective Pizzaism

Screwtape2 Dec 2025 23:50 UTC

45 points

1 comment8 min readLW link

Screwtape

2025 Unoffi­cial LessWrong Cen­sus/​Survey

Board Games!

Effec­tive Pizzaism

2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey

Effective Pizzaism