Screwtape

Karma: 8,535

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 15 Aug 2026 20:03 UTC
31 points
11
on: Screwtape’s Shortform
One metric I’ve been using for AI impressiveness is how much I could do if I was the only one in the world with them. Like, if you gave me Sonnet 5, and nobody else in the world has LLMs or know they exist, what’s that look like? I’d look like an insanely good engineer, right?
What kind of engineer knows every coding language on github, runs through features the sprint planning meeting thought would take a few days in half an hour, and can read thousands of lines of code in a minute? We agree in 2016 if you ‘saturated’ leetcode you were great, right?
So. Imagine the date is August 15th, 2016. You, and only you, have access to Mythos. Everyone else in the world has only the machine learning tools of 2016. That’s a crazy advantage, right? That is the kind of supertech that comic books are made of. You’d look like Dr Doom.
The least ambitious, most ethical thing I can imagine doing in that situation is turning in a couple dozen bug bounties and taking a month off, then doing it again whenever rent was due. I can get a lot more ethical if I’m willing to be a little more ambitious.
This insight brought to you by me spending two hours vibecoding a videogame this weekend, getting it to the point where it’s fun, and thinking ‘okay, how long would it have taken me to do this if I was actually writing all the code?’

Screwtape 11 Aug 2026 16:37 UTC
10 points
2
in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Linda Linsefors’s Shortform
It was a precise technical concept for a mostly niche industry, specifically information security workers. An incredibly important industry, to be clear, but the total number of people in it is a fraction of a fraction. There’s been a lot of talk about zero days lately with LLMs getting good at creating them, but ten years ago I’d have expected more people to need to know “hypotension” (medical jargon) or “Roth IRA” (finance jargon) than needed “zero day.”
“Zero day” is a bit different from “we didn’t know about it.” As other commenters have mentioned, the zero in zero day is about how long a patch for the exploit is out. Put it another way; if tonight the New York Times wrote about a new exploit, and for some reason the entire security world collectively decided ‘nah, someone else will handle that, I’ve got other stuff to do than fix that one’ for a week, the exploit would still be called a zero day a week later. It’s known, but there’s no patch. Why is that important? Because the legion of competent information technology workers working at most companies are usually on top of things enough to apply updates and patches, but not capable of writing their own countermeasures.
Citation: Professional experience. I used to work I.T. for a university, and I knew to update computers I found that didn’t have their patches, and knew how to set things up so the network would prompt all the computers to update or at least tell me what computers I hadn’t gotten to yet. An exploit with a seven day old fix wouldn’t (in theory!) work on us. But that approach doesn’t work for exploits with no patch, and I couldn’t write the patch. (I usually didn’t have access to the source code for our software- like, imagine there’s an outright bug in the Windows login code, and Microsoft isn’t fixing it. Decompiling the source and fixing that is way above the pay grade for a random I.T. worker, and would have violated terms of service!) In practice, that’s fine. Microsoft had a lot of smart people working hard to fix any exploits they saw, and since exploits Microsoft hadn’t fixed yet were rare, nobody was going to use one to go after my employer.
TLDR: Zero day doesn’t mean ‘we don’t know about the exploit’ it means ‘nobody has published a fix for the exploit.’ That matters because most tech workers can counter exploits where there’s a published fix (they hit the “Apply Windows Update” button) but most can’t stop exploits where there’s no published fix.

Screwtape 21 Jul 2026 21:34 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Posts I don’t have time to write
The thing that makes a U.S. court ruling work is not that the court is high status. It is that the United States Government is a pretty coherent entity (look, stop laughing for a minute, I’m about to explain) such that if Manhattan court decides that Bob should be locked up for assault, or that Carla and Dean are married, or that Ella isn’t allowed to drive a car for a year, then Albany and Buffalo courts will back that decision up and police departments all over the state will enforce that. Different U.S. courts disagree with each other sometimes, but they have a pretty established way of communicating and resolving that disagreement such that the police department knows whether they’re putting someone in jail or not. Related, the other thing that makes the court work is that there’s a police department; whether the police department finds the court “high status” or not is sort of the wrong question, the relevant question is if the judge says “put Bob in jail” then the overwhelming majority of the police will help put Bob in jail or at least not let him out.
Status isn’t the metric here. Like, it’s not obvious to me that Habryka is the highest status rationalist who works at Lightcone (Raemon has more lw karma and is the charismatic dude in solstice videos!) but Raemon can’t fire Habryka, Habryka can fire Raemon.
Should a rationalist court declare someone guilty of something, (1) half of the rationalists will openly disrespect the court, just to signal how contrarian they are; and (2) that person will sue the court for libel at an actual court.
But yes, this is basically how I expect things to go. I’ll maybe say only twenty percent of the rationalists would ignore the court, maybe going down to 5% depending on how thoroughly the court did its homework and was able to publicly argue its case.
I think the rationalist community is too big and vague for this to work, but I think things in this shape can work for more clearly defined organizations that exist partially within the rationalist community. Lightcone is a defined org, it can fire people, if needed the board could fire Habryka. Likewise Guild of the Rose, Mox, CFAR, many organizations can and do make internal judgements with varying degrees of structure and skill.
A missing ingredient is scope (many of them would wisely say ‘not my circus’ to events that happen outside their subdomain) and incentives to share their results.

Screwtape 21 Jun 2026 19:56 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
@habryka you are one bold ass son of a frequentist giving this a “haha” react. i am going to steal your ill-gotten sword and then lay siege to your walled surveilled compound. do you understand this ritual has a 69.539580085 chance of burning you in effigy? do you feel any remorse for your actions or is this exactly what we should expect from a man with as villainous a mustache as yours? i can hear the creeping footsteps of your agents coming for me even now but i am not silenced just yet. perhaps i will fall, but another will take my place, and another, and another, and laplace’s law of succession states that there is still a one over n plus two chance that someday there will be a hero who can defeat you. there are consequences to building your legions of doomers entirely out of high skill foreign assets, we will find some crack in their loyalties and exploit it before that vulnerability too moves to the *$%^ing bay.

Screwtape 20 Jun 2026 20:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
(yes, I’m totally using SF and Berkeley interchangeably here.)

Screwtape 20 Jun 2026 20:55 UTC
13 points
6
on: Screwtape’s Shortform
Rationalist rituals are, so far, fairly specific in the times of the year you have them. Winter Solstice may not be on the literal solstice but it is usually within a couple weeks of that time. Petrov Day, Rationalist Seder, Summer Solstice, the usual approach is to pick a target date that repeats annually. But not all ritual moments happen at scheduled times.

A long while ago, I recall Raemon mentioning that there isn’t yet a rationalist ritual for a funeral, but maybe someday we’d need one. And his post on grieving (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gs3vp3ukPbpaEie5L/deliberate-grieving-1) has a couple of hooks for mourning the loss of something, and losses don’t always happen at predictable times, but sometimes do have a clear type of loss. There’s some kinds of sad things that you don’t know when they’ll happen, but many people will have suffered around the same time, and some people will have suffered before. There was some kind of good thing in your life, and now it’s not there anymore, or at least not in the same place.

All this to say I think the rationalist community should develop a ritual to commemorate yet another member moving to *$%^ing Berkeley.

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.

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.)

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?”

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 : )