Screwtape

Karma: 6,196

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 3 Oct 2025 19:03 UTC
2 points
0
on: CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops
I have a lot of interest in the data collection puzzle.
Object Level Questions
My last best writeup of the problem is the Unofficial 2024 LessWrong Community Census, in one of the fishing expeditions. My strategy has been to ask about things that might make people more rational (e.g. going to CFAR workshops, reading The Sequences, etc) and ask questions to test people’s rationality (e.g. conjunction fallacy, units of exchange, etc) and then check if there’s any patterns.
There’s always the good ol’ self-report on comfort with techniques, but I’ve been trying to collect questions that are objective evaluations. A partial collection of my best:
- Calibration questions (“What are your odds that the population of Japan is >100 million?”)
- Conjunction fallacy questions (Ask group A “What are your odds Russia and Ukraine are still at war in 2026?” and ask group B “What are your odds Putin is dead and Russia and Ukraine are still at war in 2026?”)
- Units of Exchange questions (See the “Values and Dutch Booking” section of the census for one way I test that.)
- Argument by authority (“Do you agree with Scott Alexander that Ritalin has less risk of Parkinson’s than Adderall?” where this is a mistake he’s since admitted.)
- Brainstorm count (“How many unaccustomed uses of objects in this room for combat can you come up with?”)
Still, self-reports aren’t worthless.
Meta, how do we find good questions?
I’m tempted to ask people their goals, ask who’s succeeding at their goals or at common goals, and then operate as though that’s a useful proxy. There’s a fair number of people who say they want a well paying job and a happy relationship, and other people who have those things. Selection effects are sneaky though, and I don’t trust my ability to sort out people who are doing well financially because of CFAR’s good teachings from the people who were able to attend CFAR because they were already doing well financially.
On a meta level, I feel pretty excited about different groups that are trying to increase rationality asking each other’s questions. That is, if ESPR had a question, CFAR had another question, and the Guild of the Rose had a third question, I think it’d be great if each of them asked their attendees all three questions. Even better in my view to add a few organizations that are adjacent but not really aiming at that goal; ACX Everywhere or Manifold, for instance. Those would be control groups. The different organizations are doing different things, and if ESPR starts doing better on the evaluation questions than Guild of the Rose then maybe the Guild starts borrowing more from ESPR’s approach. If ACX Everywhere attendees have better calibration than Metaculus, then we notice we’re confused. I’ve been doing this for the ULWC Census already, and I’d be interested in adding it to after-event surveys.
Is there one or two questions CFAR wants to ask, or has historically asked, that you’d like to add to that collection? Put another way, what are the couple of evaluation questions you think CFAR alumni will do better on relative to say, ACX Everywhere attendees?

Screwtape 22 Sep 2025 19:28 UTC
5 points
1
on: The Only Option Left
Take a Screwtape Point for putting your numbers down in text. You’re talking a decent sized game here, but I do think I agree with your point that Politics Is The Mindkiller ideally would have been more an invitation to get good than a prohibition on trying. I disagree the content audit makes sense- most front-page posts on LessWrong don’t contain scored object-level political forecasting because this crowd isn’t as interested in politics. I think AI posts account for >60% of the frontpage all on their own, it’d be kind of weird to me if this crowd was more interested in politics than like, fun math puzzles or how to dress better. Maybe I’m typical minding?
(I did, and do, take it as a prohibition on trying when you’re bad at it. Arguing about contemporary politics is like a metaphorical version of doing a backflip- totally doable, but if you just read a blog post on it and maybe watch someone else do it a couple times then try it yourself you’re going to hurt yourself. Work up to it a bit.)
You stuck your neck out, so I’ll stick mine a little out. Have a Fatebook tournament. I’m presently at .3/.15/.6/.3/.4 on your predictions, respectively, though since I haven’t put a ton of thought into any of them but the manufacturing question I’m probably anchoring on you.

Screwtape 21 Sep 2025 2:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Meetup Month
If you want a blurb, how about

”ACX Everywhere is Scott Alexander’s twice-a-year effort to shine light on local Astral Codex Ten meetups. If you’d like to talk to other readers of the blog, you can take a look at the list of meetups to see if there’s one in your city! If there isn’t one for your city yet, you can fill out a late-entry by filling out the form for an October ACX Everywhere. Running an ACX Everywhere can be pretty straightforward; pick a time (weekend afternoons are best) and a place (a local cafe will do just fine) and be ready to talk to interesting people!”

Screwtape 20 Sep 2025 22:50 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Meetup Month
Usually we would be. I do take late entries (a number of people only realize they over-procrastinated when the Times & Places announcement goes out) but usually shut it off after a few weeks. LessWrong’s having a meetup month though! Seems a good excuse to try and get to two hundred :)

Screwtape 19 Sep 2025 5:29 UTC
7 points
0
on: Meetup Month
ACX Meetup Czar here- I love a good meetup month, and we’re presently five meetups away from having two hundred ACX Everywheres. If there’s no meetup in your city yet and you want to add one in October, I’ll take a late entry. Fill out a quick form and I’ll get back to you!

Screwtape 10 Sep 2025 23:26 UTC
5 points
0
on: Screwtape’s Shortform
Game design thoughts:
Missing information or a too-complex information environment is a big part of where I’m excited about cohabitive game design. The market works to summarize many many preferences. Large WoW guilds run into problems of organizing information.
I’m musing about some kind of fog of war chess game. Each player controls one piece, and can see all of the squares they can move to. They can’t see the whole board, and can only communicate to the king how badly they want to move, and the king decides. This would be a team competitive game, but the idea of adding small side goals for pieces (such as, you get 2 points if your team wins, and 1 point if you’re alive at the end win or lose) could make for an unusually focused cohabitive design space.
In general a lot of my cohabitive game design ideas come out in the form of having larger player bases. I should try and make a really tight two player cohabitive setup.
(Very tangentially related but if you want to talk Cohabitive Game Design stuff, I’ll be hanging around at Metagame.games this weekend.)

Screwtape 24 Aug 2025 16:28 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I kinda wish the subsequent back and forth between you and Habryka and Ben hadn’t happened yet downthread here, because I was hoping to elicit a more specific set of odds (is “pretty high” 75%? 90%? 99%?) and see if you wanted to bet.
I can sympathize with the feeling where it seems an interlocutor says false things so often if they said it was sunny outside I’d bring an umbrella. I also haven’t been tracking every conversation on LessWrong that involves you, but that said even in a world where Habryka was entirely uncorrelated with truth I’d have remembered the big moderation post about the two of you and guessed Duncan at least would have said something along those lines.

Screwtape 24 Aug 2025 0:34 UTC
20 points
12
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
So it is in fact straightforwardly true to say that there are zero examples of “top author X cites Said as a top reason for why they do not want to post or comment on LW” turning out to just be straightforwardly true.
I’m having trouble modeling you here Said. When you wrote there were zero examples, what odds would you have put that nobody would be able to produce a quote of anyone saying something like this? What odds would you currently put that nobody can produce a similar quote from a second such author?
You say “the count now stands at one example” as though it’s new information. Duncan in particular seems hard to have missed. I’m trying to work out why you didn’t think that counted. Maybe you forgot about him saying that? Maybe it has to be directly quoted in this thread?

Screwtape 20 Aug 2025 2:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
Why would Bella reply by invoking this sort of abstract, somewhat esoteric, meta-level concept like “setting the zero point”, instead of saying something more like “… uh, Chloe, are you ok? you know we don’t have 15 cows to divide, right?”.
Because she’s in a silly shortform dialogue that’s building up to the esoteric, meta-level concept like the game theory in the third part mostly. I wanted some kind of underhanded negotiating tactic I could have Chloe try, I came up with asking for way more than is reasonable to set the stage for “compromise,” and then I noticed that the tactic had a good conceptual handle and I referenced it.
This makes me suspect that whatever this fictional conversation is a metaphor for, is not actually analogous to dividing six spherical cows between two people.
It’s pretty generic, abstracted negotiation and Chloe is being pretty blatant and ambitious. Asking for value that the other person didn’t even think was on the table is a negotiation move I’ve seen and heard of though, sometimes successfully. For a more realistic version, compare a salary negotiation where the applicant asks for 10% higher salary, gets told the company doesn’t have that much to pay employees, and then tries for a couple weeks extra vacation time or more company stock instead.
I think the math at the end still works even if the two sides don’t agree on how many cows are actually available.

Screwtape 15 Aug 2025 17:54 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
4 should be there not because it’s what Cameron thinks is fair but because it’s what they’re offering.
How about “4 because that’s what you say is fair for you to get”? Cameron isn’t offering 4 to Bryer, it’s a 2:4 split with 4 to Cameron.
(I want to make sure I get this part right, and appreciate the edit pass!)

Screwtape 15 Aug 2025 17:52 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
That’s only the right thing to do if Camerons know that the fair split is actually 3:3 (it’s unclear why they’d be unhappy about it if they think it’s fair: are they unhappy because they were interacting with someone who couldn’t be convinced to give up some of the cows?). If Cameron thinks the fair split is 4, they are supposed to still offer 2:4. (They could also offer 3:3 with a bit under ²⁄₃ chance and walk away otherwise, but they don’t need to do it here.)
In these stories, the Cs are not aiming at a fair split (or to the extent they are, it’s more of an “all’s fair in love, war, and spherical cow negotiations” kind of fair.) They are aiming at getting as many cows as they can. This is not stated explicitly and I do think there’s a valid reading of the text where the Cs are just really badly calibrated on what’s fair, but in my head I was writing it with a mind to “okay, what’s some really annoying low hanging fruit for aggressive negotiation tactics?” Cameron is written as unhappy because in the author’s head, their attempts to get some ‘free’ extra cows failed.
Depending on context, I don’t think the Cs are doing something morally wrong- if I go to buy a used car from a dealer, I expect them to try this kind of thing on me and I’ll do it right back to them if I can. If I’m negotiating salary with a standard corporation, I expect them to try this kind of thing on me and I’ll to it to them too. But it’s not behavior I want from people on my team within the team.

Screwtape 15 Aug 2025 0:17 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
The internet’s^[1] lack of tone-of-voice claims another victim.
1. ^
  I agree the internet actually can convey tone-of-voice. I also stand by calling it the internet here instead of “text communication” or “forum software” because the opportunity to make this pedantic footnote amused me.

Screwtape 14 Aug 2025 18:32 UTC
11 points
5
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
I have added a footnote: “I agree this is actually Pathfinder. I also stand by calling it D&D here because I expect calling it Pathfinder would confuse more people than it enlightens, Pathfinder’s close enough to round to D&D for these purposes, and I guess I can add this footnote.”
I’m curious if this satisfies you?
(I’m also amused that I see the “It’s not D&D, it’s Pathfinder” point brought up repeatedly but don’t think I’ve run across someone making the “It’s not BDSM, those are abusive relationships” point.)

Screwtape 14 Aug 2025 15:53 UTC
49 points
4
on: Screwtape’s Shortform
Bob and Carl are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they’re negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
Bob considers the situation and opens by saying “I think the reasonable thing to do here is go with 3 each. That seems fair.”
“I’d rather have 5,” says Carl breezily.
“That doesn’t seem fair at all,” says Bob, a little surprised. “That’s not compromising.”
“Hrm, tell you what. I’ll compromise, and I’ll have 4.” Carl says with good cheer.
“I- what? No, the fair thing is 3 each.” Bob sounds a little angry now.
“Now who isn’t compromising?” Carl asks, and Dean (who started watching the discussion recently, but wasn’t around long enough to have a good sense of what their goals are) nods in agreement.
“Fine, I’ll take 2,” Bob splutters. But he’s not happy about it.
Bella and Chloe are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they’re negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
“I want 6,” Bella says, “do you want to just meet in the middle?”
“That’s hardly fair,” Chloe says. “You’re not giving anything up.”
“I said I wanted 6. I can compromise. You want 6 as well, right?” Bella asks.
“How about I get 15?” Chloe proposes as though that’s a reasonable number of spherical cows to be given out of the six at hand.
“I- what?” Bella is baffled. “Is that what you want or what you suggest as a compromise?”
“I suppose I’ll be generous. I’ll take 5.”
“I’m sorry, but no. That’s not fair at all.” Bella says, starting to get annoyed.
“Why not?” asks Darla, who has been watching long enough to hear the conversation but not long enough to have a sense of their goals, or of the range of spherical cows. “Chloe is offering a lot more to go from 15 to 5 than you are to go from 6 to 1.”
“You can’t actually expect me to take her getting 15 as a reasonable starting position. That’s blatantly setting the zero point.” Bella argues, getting heated.
“I suppose I accept your apology, but to make up for it can we compromise at least on me getting 4?” Chloe says, with an air of resignation.
“See Bella? Chloe is offering to compromise again,” Darla points out, trying to be helpful. “And you did say sorry, which sounds like you agree you made a mistake.”
“That’s not- you know what, fine, whatever,” Bella says. But she’s not happy about it.
Bryer and Cameron are about to negotiate. Conveniently, the thing they’re negotiating over is the division of six spherical cows. Each of them would ideally like all six for themselves.
“I think the fair thing is 3 each.” Bryer says.
“Well, I think-” Cameron starts, but Bryer interrupts them.
“And since both of us know the standard way to divide gains, you know I’ll randomly reject divisions that stray from that with a probability proportionate to how unfair it seems to me,” Bryer finished.
″. . . I get 4?” Cameron suggests.
“If that’s your final offer I’ll accept with slightly less than ³⁄₄ probability. 3 because that’s what I think I is fair for you to get, 4 because that’s what you think is fair for you to get,” Bryer says.
“That’s a weird bit of math you just suggested, and I’m not sure it’s applicable,” Cameron says.
“It’s not that weird,” Dakota says. Dakota wasn’t really paying attention, at least not long enough to know what everyone’s goals are, but who did pay attention to the math. “We all learn that in school, usually by the time we’re ten. And if we didn’t, we pick it up from the Dungeons and Dragons^[1] BDSM fanfiction that’s required reading for everyone in our subculture. I was as surprised as you were when the rightful caliph declared it was required reading, but we did all read it. And there’s a short version to point people at if they don’t know it.”
Cameron opens and closes their mouth a few times. They say “3 then.” But they’re not happy about it.
1. ^
  I agree this is actually Pathfinder. I also stand by calling it D&D here because I expect calling it Pathfinder would confuse more people than it enlightens, Pathfinder’s close enough to round to D&D for these purposes, and I guess I can add this footnote.

Screwtape 14 Aug 2025 15:16 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong
First time I’d seen There’s A Reason You Don’t Know. I’d be fascinated to hear how well that works for them, because oh boy does it not really work some groups. (It’s rationalists, we’re some groups)

Screwtape 14 Aug 2025 15:12 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong
There’s something here about how mistakes get treated, though I don’t know if I can articulate it well at the moment.
Like, if I quote two or three sentences of a report, did I pick a reasonable piece of the concluding paragraph or did I cherry pick the best possible sentences for my argument? If one column got left out of the dataset and it turned out that column made my case weaker, was that a data parsing mishap or a deliberate attempt to suppress information?
People often remember best the parts of information that agree with them. (That’s an assertion I don’t have citations for at the moment, but I think it’s true.) So a little bit of that kind of thing doesn’t mean they’re doing it deliberately. But if I pick up on a lot of it, more than usual, then I get more suspicious.

Screwtape 13 Aug 2025 16:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: kittyinthewild’s comment on: Open Thread—Summer 2025
Welcome, and I’m glad you decided to start publishing more! Have you already found the OBNYC group in New York, or could you use a pointer?

Screwtape 6 Aug 2025 15:00 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: jenn’s comment on: jenn’s Shortform
Every so often I stumble across a question in need of a survey, and as it happens I have one.
(Smaller response rate than I’d like though, I should try that chart on the ACX survey sometime.)

Screwtape 5 Aug 2025 15:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Dark Arts As A Scaffolding Skill For Rationality
- Selection vs Learning
If we select for people who’ve independently figured these things out, then we should do our best to learn from them. We should try to keep them around if at all possible; we should pay attention to their commentary on the matter as well as to their behavior; and we should preserve and promulgate their insights.
Somewhat agreed. Sometimes people who are good at the thing aren’t good at teaching it, or even at being in the environment in which it’s taught.
To use physical combat as an example, maybe the world’s best fighters are hardened criminals and hyper-vigilant soldiers. If that’s the case I’d guess the move is to have instructors to study them, talk with them, and then I want the instructors to make the grayspace safer for students than criminals would allow and kinder to the teachers than hyper-vigilance and flailing limbs would combine to be.
(I’m two steps down hypotheticals here- one being that the people good at the thing aren’t necessarily the best at teaching it, and second that there’s a better way to teach than just throwing students into the deep end. I don’t presently have citable evidence for either of those, just intuition and metis.)
If I may use fictional evidence as an example for a moment, Dr. House would be a terrible biology 101 lecturer. I’m a fan of figuring out how to teach the things and then trying to make sure they get taught.
There’s a pretty important ~crux of “okay, what are you trying to do right now though?” for me. I spend a lot of my time trying to teach what I view as basic and early-intermediate skills, or trying to be a force multiplier for other people to teach those. To do that well, it helps me to have a sense of what the advanced skills are like, and for what people do with these skills out the in the world, and it costs a decent amount if someone is bad at explaining themselves or drives people to drop the class. If someone views themselves as managing an intensive care unit instead of managing a (deeply weird and distributed and non-standard) education system, they might correctly be a lot more willing to put up with various drawbacks in exchange for brilliant diagnostic insights.
(I also spend time doing operations work that has only downstream relationship to rationality skills, and time handling conflict management in a way where spotting lies is directly useful to me.)
- Swords
Okay. I agree that the text of the essay is talking about putting away swords under some circumstances. If you are interpreting it as “put away swords at all, ever” then yes. Something about the connection with repairing and maintaining the way lead me to internally complete it as “put away swords all time time, such that you never pick one up” and that’s different. To the extent where that’s my misunderstanding, oops, I apologize.
So far I’m in agreement with Duncan here.
Of course, CONSTANT VIGILANCE needn’t be all that great a burden.
I don’t know what your internal experience of CONSTANT VIGILANCE is like. For me, in interpersonal social situations, it sucks. I dislike the feeling. I have a lot of trouble setting my mental dial high enough to reliably catch manipulative shenanigans and low enough that I don’t waste hours cross checking my notes on what people say against the physical evidence that exists, letting pass the normal mistakes of normal human minds and picking up on the patterns of malefactors.
“Likewise, adopting practices that preclude Dark Arts is just good sense.” If we as a collective rationalist community (or better yet a general civilization) had an agreed upon canon of techniques or language use which precluded particular Dark Arts, that’d be great. We don’t. Again, I spend a lot of my time in the top of the funnel with first-timers and old-timers-who-nobody-taught. So when I spot someone doing something that seems Dark Artsy- not just at the “metaphorically carrying a sword” level but the “metaphorically slashing” level- I have a bunch of extra work to figure out whether nobody told them they shouldn’t, whether they’ll stop if I explain the better way to do it, whether stopping even makes sense or if we’re just actually in an environment where unilaterally disarming would be a bad idea.
But if we rule it a transgression, to be vigilant, to be on the lookout for treachery—well, now we’re simply sabotaging ourselves.
I think turning the sensitivity dial all the way down, such that you wouldn’t notice any amount of sword usage, is a mistake.
I think different responses to it based on context makes a lot of sense. If someone throws a punch at me on the street, I’m in fight mode. If someone who isn’t the teacher throws a punch at me seemingly randomly in the dojo, I block and calmly explain that we don’t do that, we throw punches at people when in the ring sparring or when told to drill. (And if the teacher does it, it kinda depends on the teacher’s style and style of the dojo.) If someone steps into the ring opposite me, we bow to each other, the ref says go, and they throw a punch at me, this is fine.
You used the phrase “lookout for treachery.” Yeah, throwing a punch during an agreed on spar isn’t treachery, sucker punching someone when they’re tying their shoelaces is. We’re using the sword metaphor a lot. With rationality, I think there’s moves that are actually just normal and expected in much of the world and would be disallowed in the inner space of Duncan’s dojo. Like, when I buy a used car in a strange town, I basically expect the dealer to try and screw me over and not tell me about a history of engine trouble. I’m not mad at the dealer for trying it. If I was buying a used car from an old friend, I would expect them to tell me if there was engine trouble, and I’d be mad if they conveniently forgot to mention it. It’s not even treachery when the dealer does it, that’s basically how everybody knows buying used cars works.
To put it another way, what is foolish is the idea that we can defend against Dark Arts by some sort of person-level inclusion test: someone passes the test? Great, now we never again have to think about whether anything they say or do is suspect.
That seems to be an exaggeration. I agree that a person-level, one-time test after which you trust someone entirely would be a mistake. I would be surprised if Duncan said that you couldn’t get bounced out of Master Lee’s advanced classes once you were in. Are you suggesting that’s actually what he’s saying?
But trusting someone more because of what they’ve done, with less regular checks, seems fine. One doesn’t give every single user full admin powers, but the I.T. staff has more power, and the Chief Technology Officer might have essentially full power in the system. And yet, if someone notices the logs are weird and it looks like the CTO is up to something, that still gets flagged.
So how can this be any less true for a group, made up of God only knows how many people, who know each other not nearly so well as you know yourself…?
I do not believe it will ever become entirely, 100% true. I do believe it can become true more often, of more people, if slow and steady work is put into the project. I think that’s worth trying.
When I walk down the street, full of strangers I have never met before and will never meet again, I don’t particularly worry someone is going to punch me in the face. If someone steps into my path and starts yelling at me, my odds go up a little and maybe I make sure my hands are free- but my odds aren’t actually very high yet, because more people just yell about conspiracy theories or the unfairness of the world than commit assault. And then if I see them start to draw back and swing, now my odds are actually high.
We have, as a civilization, achieved a world where adults in our cities don’t need to carry swords.
Thus so with manipulation and lies. I kinda trust random people on the street, though I wouldn’t put too much weight on it. I basically did trust the people I worked with at my old software job- sometimes I double checked to cover their mistakes, I was aware enough that office politics existed that I think I would have noticed a string of problems, but we also had all been through the educational and acculturation processes that meant we broadly agreed on what good software was like and what behavior towards each other was appropriate. But that education and acculturation wasn’t just pointless busywork! (Some of it was, but some of it wasn’t!) University was a gray space where the really dumb and the really rude got corrected or weeded out- not perfectly, but usefully.
Yeah, I try and check my own code for problems. Yeah, I did code reviews and checked my coworker’s code for problems. But there’s finite amount of time and energy and I scrutinized incoming pull requests from the public way closer than I scrutinized my coworker’s changes.
And circling back to rationality and what I said about context above: one can take in some portion of the masses that haven’t learned how not to ad hominem or how to taboo their words so it isn’t surprising if they try, teach them the thing and that it’s expected of them in this space, if not out in the world, and then pass them on to a zone where one can just expect that everyone in here knows they aren’t supposed to do that and has demonstrated that they’re capable of it. That doesn’t mean one can 100% know nobody will do it, but it changes the rate significantly and it would change my reaction from “ah, you have made a common error, let me show you the correct move” to “you know better than that. What’s the deal?”
I would love more gray spaces.
- Rationalist Skill
Mm… the principle of “just because something is a good thing does not mean that it is a ‘rationalist’ thing” is of course entirely correct. The question is just what qualifies some skill as a “rationalist” skill.
I think this is a good question, and also it verges on “what is the full list of rationalist skills or at least a ” which seems a bit big for this particular comment section. I think spotting lies and more general manipulation and deceit is pretty centrally a rationalist skill.
If we take “rationalist skill” to mean only such skills as are somehow “meta” or apply to the development and practice of techniques of rationality, then my reason #2 should not convince us that lying is a rationalist skill.
And that seems self-referential. Hockey skills are the ones that apply to the practice of techniques of hockey, chess skills are the ones that apply to the practice of techniques of chess, florgle skills are the ones that apply to the practice of techniques of florgle. If we have a solid definition of rationality (ideally one concise and generally agreed upon, but any working definition is fine for the purposes of conversation between a few people) then rationality skills are the skills which apply to rationality.
From LessWrong’s About page:
Rationality has a number of definitions^[1] on LessWrong, but perhaps the most canonical is that the more rational you are, the more likely your reasoning leads you to have accurate beliefs, and by extension, allows you to make decisions that most effectively advance your goals.
(If you think that’s a poor definition of rationality, that’s fine, but I think that’s a close-enough definition that I’m fine using it and the onus is on whoever disagrees to state what they think rationality is.)
It’s again plausible to me that getting better at lying makes someone better at detecting lies (thus having more accurate beliefs.) And of course, in the right circumstance being able to lie well certainly can advance your goals. I’m not against learning to lie in the pursuit of learning to detect lies- that’s practically the whole point of this essay. But I do think it’s worth noting the distinction, and that the goal is learning to detect lies and other manipulations.
If we take “rationalist skill” to mean also such skills as are instrumentally-convergently useful in a near-universal set of classes of circumstances, regardless of details, with the only requirement being that interaction between non-perfectly-aligned agents is a significant aspect of the scenario, then my reason #2 should convince us that lying is a rationalist skill.
That argument proves too much I think. The ability to inflict pain and physical damage on other people is convergently useful in interactions between non-perfectly-aligned agents (and I’m Hobbesian enough to think it’s near-universally important at least in potential) but that doesn’t mean I think marksmanship with guns is a rationalist skill. Same with the ability to make friends, or communicate clearly and understand what other people are trying to communicate; it’s useful (probably in even more circumstances than lying is) but I don’t think of clear communication or making friends as a specifically rationalist skill. It’s just a useful thing to be able to do.

Screwtape 3 Aug 2025 3:49 UTC
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in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: The Dark Arts As A Scaffolding Skill For Rationality
I’d be interested in hearing more about the different kinds of judges? I just googled Flow and Communication Judge for debate and got a bit about diagramming the flow of a debate.
(You can also say “go read X website” or “the consensus is pretty good, random googling will get you basically the right answer.” Reading up on debate rules has been added to my backlist but you strike me as the kind of person who might enjoy explaining it :) )