Screwtape

Karma: 3,102

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 10 Jun 2014 16:50 UTC
12 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Skyler here, a 21 year old technology student. Born and raised in the backwoods of Vermont to ahem philosophically diverse parents, was encouraged to read pretty much every philosophical book the library had except for Ayn Rand. So naturally I gravitated towards that as soon as I became enough of a teenager, but apparently completely missed the antagonism towards non-geniuses and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I seriously disliked every objectivist I met.

About two years ago, I had a professor who introduced me to HPMoR, which I enjoyed immensely. It took me around a month to move to the sequences. They seem to have had the curious property of seeming perfectly obvious, like someone simply expressing what I already knew just in better words, and while a lot of them do fall close in broad subject to things I’d written about before, the only use I’d had for bayesian statistics prior to reading them was spam filters. (And then the author’s notes pointed me to Worm, which consumed a month or two.)

A couple of weeks ago however, I encountered a post on SlateStarCodex (which I’d been reading after stumbling upon it through unrelated browsing) about trans people, and somehow around the same time got linked to Alicorn’s Polyhacking article. My positions previously were similar to the authors (Thought of both transgender and polyamory as mildly wrong and not understandable) and both made a solid argument that actually changed my mind. This was not the “Oh, of course I knew that” of the sequences, but a “Huh. I thought that was wrong, but they have good points. Let me think for five minutes and see if there are any more arguments for or against I can think of now.” By the end of the respective days, I had a different opinion than I previously had, and was beginning to make changes in how I conducted myself because of one of them. In addition, they both seemed like interesting people I could relate to, and a community of such people could be really fun. (As opposed to Eliezer Y.- That is, I can imagine having a conversation with these people, whereas if I was in a conversation with Eliezer Y. I would feel compelled to take notes.)

So yeah. I’m here to see how many other topics require me to change my mind, and to hopefully have cool conversations with interesting people. Any recommendations on where to start?

Screwtape 10 Jun 2014 22:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Meatspace meetups sound like a good deal of fun, and possibly a faster route to being part of the community than commenting on articles that I think I have something to add. Downside is, I’m currently in Rochester New York, and unless I’m misusing the meetups page somehow, looks like the closest regular meetup is in Albany. That’s a long bike ride. :) If anybody is in Rochester, by all means let me know!

Screwtape 11 Jun 2014 0:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
A combination of that post and What universal human experiences are you missing without realizing it? actually. I would say that I am strongly typed as male, strong enough that occasionally I’ve been known to get annoyed at my body not being male enough. (Larger muscle groups, more body hair, darker beard, etc.) Probably influencing this are the facts that Skyler is the feminine form of my name, and that puberty was downright cruel to me. As you say, it’s not common to think of being strongly or weakly identified with your own sex, rather than just a binary “fits/doesn’t fit” check.

Screwtape 13 Jun 2014 3:22 UTC
1 point
on: Strategic choice of identity
I think the most frequently used identity I have was created why a public speaking teacher commented that I was just fine acting on stage, but became very shy and nervous when I was speaking as myself. I don’t recall if this was her idea or mine, but I developed a ‘character’ that was basically me sans said shyness. Large body language, typically spoke louder, almost a caricature of confidence. While it was originally just for speaking to large groups, it quickly got used for any conversation with people who weren’t my close friends. Sometime during college, I got so accustomed to using this ‘character’ that I realized it wasn’t exactly an act any more.

Ironically, a very useful identity was one I abandoned- in high school, I thought of myself as a prodigy, far smarter than the hopeless plebeians around me. This was probably useful, as it kept me focused on learning on my own when the class didn’t move fast enough. On the other hand, as soon as I hit college, I realized this wasn’t very helpful since it stopped me from asking questions, noticing that I didn’t understand the material, and working usefully with the other students. I think it was very useful while I had it, but by far the most important lesson I learned in those four years was that I am not a genius. (I’m smart, but there’s an order of magnitude difference from where I thought of myself and where I see myself now.)

Screwtape 23 Oct 2014 15:50 UTC
65 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Survey finished- erred on the side of not screwing up Yvain’s numbers where possible, but I’m curious what the ideal way to mark down Religious Background for results of families that divorced over religious disagreement is. Also had a really strong desire (thwarted, but present) to put a SQL injection into the question about whether the universe is a simulation, which is a bad idea no matter what the answer turns out to be or whether I could conceivably affect the simulation. It’s like a pascal’s wager mixed with a Russian roulette, only the gun is fully loaded. Either I screw up the numbers, I tank the survey, or I crash the simulation. Dear brain, we were reading about akrasia just recently, were you paying attention?

Screwtape 19 Jan 2017 17:56 UTC
0 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, February 2016
TLDR: I discovered competing to beat future!me is more motivating than trying to avoid being beaten by past!me.

Expanded: I’ve been experimenting with diet/exercise since my previous habits of continual low-grade movement and snacking has become impractical. I knew I do much more intense physical activity in competition than on my own, so I tried mindhacking to think of my past self as competition. This didn’t work as a generic idea, didn’t work despite keeping track of what exercise (kilometers run, reps lifted, etc) I did on that day on the previous week, and wasn’t helped by leaving comments to future!me on the records. (Goading from opponents in competition usually is motivating.) I think I’ve hit a successful approach though!

Key changes seemed to be increasing the time difference to a month, and also thinking of competing with my future self. That is, the thought “Past!me ran X kilometers, so I need to do more than X” wasn’t particularly motivating, but thinking “I’m at X kilometers, but if I can do X+Y then future!me will have a much harder time beating that and I might win!” is motivating. This probably implies something useful about how my brain handles time discounting, but for the moment I’ll take the success and make use of it.

Edit: Crud, this was under “latest” so I read over the year without catching it was last year. sigh

Screwtape 27 Jan 2017 16:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Be secretly wrong
I would argue this claim understates the problem. In my experience, claims can be made at one of two levels, either strongly held or weakly held. One cannot perfectly phrase a claim such that nobody confuses one for the other, and other people tend to ignore weakly held claims.

It would be really useful to be able to say “I am moderately confident that the Purple party’s policy will lead to Bad Things” and get feedback that raises or lowers my confidence in that claim. Most responses unfortunately will assume that I was more confident than I actually was. (This issue might be summarized as “Screwtape needs to spend less time on facebook.”)

Something that might help lower this inhibition is an ability to retract or update on claims usefully. Technically, a blog lets you make a statement and then later edit the post or post an update, but you can’t rely on people rereading the post or following your blog to see updates. This might be solved socially (a norm of checking someone still believes a claim before responding to that claim or propagating what they said?) or with technology (rss feeds and edit buttons on posts) but will probably need to be solved with a combination of the two.

Screwtape 2 Feb 2017 21:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: dglukhov’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, February 2017
Depending on your work/study habits, I find that not sitting for very long helps me immensely. I find my posture degrades the longer I’m sitting. If I stand up and stretch or take a walk around the block every hour, my back feels much better at the end of the day.

Screwtape 3 Apr 2017 20:12 UTC
0 points
on: Plan-Bot: A Simple Planning Tool
As far as web-dev comments go, the first one is that it doesn’t react well to the browser window being shorter than expected. Once the input field goes below the view, you have to scroll to get to it. The robot is cute, but I’d make it as small as you need to to make sure the input is onscreen, possibly as small as you need to get the steps onscreen.

As far as the process goes, what does it mean if it keeps bottoming out with ‘Q. What went wrong? A. Skyrim’? =P

Screwtape 10 Apr 2017 20:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Requesting Questions For A 2017 LessWrong Survey
Trivial suggestion- include in the survey a question that goes something like “roll a die ten times, and write the results in order here. If you would like to be able to identify yourself on this survey later, make a copy of those results and look for them in the dataset when it is released. If you want to make sure nobody can possibly identify you on this survey, leave this question blank.”

If you want to make it something people might remember without writing it down, ask them to generate a couple of words from the diceware list.

Screwtape 11 Apr 2017 19:25 UTC
3 points
on: Requesting Questions For A 2017 LessWrong Survey
Perhaps a question like “At what age did you first encounter or begin to develop Rationality?”

I currently think it’s very likely the thought patterns that make one a useful programmer are in place sometime in grade school. Given the overlap between rationalists and programmers, I’m curious if something similar is going on. I managed to run a small test by handing HP:MoR to a bunch of kids in one of the local library programs and the ones who were already growing into a geeky/intellectual cluster took to it pretty well.

If we want to do outreach, knowing whether we’re convincing people with different kinds of minds to think rationally or just finding people who already sort of think like this sounds useful. Knowing the age at which say, HP:MoR or the sequences could be understood means we have more data whether introducing college students, high school students, or grade school students to them is going to be interesting or boring to them. I don’t think we can necessarily get that answer from just asking what age people started developing this mindset, nor do I think their answers will be without error bars since we may be talking about childhood memories. Also, I’m genuinely curious- are the stories of developing this strain of thought in the single digit ages weird exceptions or the typical origin story of a rationalist?

Apologies if that kind of question has already been explored.

Screwtape 13 Apr 2017 18:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Requesting Questions For A 2017 LessWrong Survey
Right, which is why how the question is phrased is tricky. I wouldn’t expect someone to devise something as distilled and deliberate as the Sequences independently or to use the title “Rationality” for what they’re doing, for example. Like you though, reading the Sequences for the first time felt less like entirely new things and more like finding clearer expressions and vocabulary for a style of thought that was already in my head. It’s how common that experience is that I would find interesting- how many people were in this sort of intellectual cluster before encountering the Sequences? Do they usually teach a new kind of approach, or do they upgrade a style of thought that existed beforehand?

I know I’m not phrasing this question well enough for the survey at present. If what I’m getting at makes sense and is interesting, assistance rephrasing it would be appreciated.

Screwtape 17 Apr 2017 14:07 UTC
8 points
in reply to: squidious’s comment on: Straw Hufflepuffs and Lone Heroes
“Ravenclaws are smart, we should be more like that” seems like a reasonable if very lossy summary of the whole rationalist project. If there was a useful book on how to be smarter and how to use my intellect more effectively, I would read that book. If a useful book on how to be hardworking and how to effectively benefit from teamwork were written, I would probably also read that book. (I know of and have read several of each of those books actually, though how useful they are varies.)

Writing a book of Hufflepuff and stopping there seems like it would miss the point however. While the natural form of “How to be a Ravenclaw” is as a book to be consumed by lone smart scholars, the natural form of “How to be a Hufflepuff” is probably as a community- it’s the best way to learn that skillset, the best way for those who are naturally good at the skillset to teach it, and the end goal of the skillset. (C’mon Ravenclaws, admit it- our end goal is usually to have more books ;) )

Screwtape 17 Apr 2017 17:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Straw Hufflepuffs and Lone Heroes
Hrm, you’re right. We clearly need to come up with an aesthetic modification for smartphones that makes them at least as cool as undetectable extension pouches.

Screwtape 17 Apr 2017 18:11 UTC
5 points
in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: Straw Hufflepuffs and Lone Heroes
“Ravenclaw wanted to have better communities, so they wrote a book about it and other Ravenclaws all separately read the book, and nothing further happened” sounds like such a probable way for this to fail that it’d be almost as funny as it would be sad. I assume Raemon has foreseen this possibility and has some plan to counteract this. To be clear, writing a book (or a series of blog posts) is a good way to get an idea across to Ravenclawish people, and emotional/mythic calls to action like this seem like a good piece of that plan.

As a datapoint, at the end of reading this post I was feeling inspired and positive about the project. That doesn’t seem to have bottomed out into any useful actions, but I’m pretty geographically isolated, and I did spend some time thinking of virtual community-focused actions that might be helpful.

Then again, “read a book about community, which prompted introspective thought about abstract community building plans” also sounds like a stereotypical Ravenclaw action. Darn.

Edit: I’m not saying Ravenclaw tendencies are a bad thing or that we want to diminish those values. Those values are some of my favourite things about this community. I am saying (while attempting to be humorous) that writing and abstractly thinking about how to Hufflepuff might be sort of like trying to mix lots of shades of blue in order to get green. Sometimes you need yellow as a primary source, and can’t engineer it out of blue.

Screwtape 19 Apr 2017 23:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: April ’17 I Care About Thread
In a perfect world, the better math education would be funded by the proceeds from said state lotteries.

Screwtape 25 Apr 2017 12:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: sapphire’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 24 - Apr. 30, 2017
At the solstice last year someone asked me “What’s your origin story?” which I thought was a pretty cool way to phrase what was in the end a sort of generic question.

Screwtape 26 Apr 2017 20:02 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Ritalin’s comment on: Stupid Questions May 2017
If I don’t get up, I won’t wind up in the office. If I’m consistently not in the office, I don’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, I won’t have be able to buy books or take attractive people out on dates. Running through that chain of logic takes roughly five to ten minutes, which is about how long the snooze on my alarm is, so by the third time it goes off I’m usually out of bed.

A useful hack for me is setting the alarm an hour earlier than I need, and letting myself do whatever I want for that hour. Since this is the only timespan in my day I’m guaranteed to be alone and to have no expectations, it tends to be an opportunity worth getting up for.

Weekend mornings either have an expectation similar to (though usually lesser than) work, or offer a whole day to goof off. Accordingly, there are some weekends where I don’t get out of bed until I either get hungry or get a wave of energy that makes me want to run around.

Screwtape 27 Apr 2017 20:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: Background Reading: The Real Hufflepuff Sequence Was The Posts We Made Along The Way
I’ve found that people who are “on the clock” so to speak (that is, are at that moment talking with you solely because of a job they’re doing) are almost always easier to interact with when treated as NPCs with a limited script that is traversed mostly like a flowchart.

Police officers pulling you over, wait staff at a restaurant, and phone technical support representatives (to name some examples) are sometimes literally following a script. It can be helpful for both of you to know their script and to follow it yourself.

Screwtape 1 May 2017 20:45 UTC
5 points
in reply to: WalterL’s comment on: Open thread, May. 1 - May. 7, 2017
My standby is “From what you’ve described, it would take about $X days” where X is an estimate that assumes that they want everything associated with what they’ve said. (So, if they asked for messaging, I assume they want user icons, some kind of friends list or department groupings, and probably file transfer too.) There is a genuine use case for this! If your business guys are non-techies, they might know that adding some feature will probably earn Y dollars, but don’t know how much it would cost to add. In those cases, they’re really looking to estimate if it’s worth it; if they’re doing things right, the next step if it looks good is to actually sit down and write up a solid spec.

Of course, lots of places aren’t like that. At my job, my estimate is continued with “but I could be pretty far off in either direction. Can you tell me more specifically...” and then from there try and guide them into giving me actual requirements. I write down the main points of what they’re asking for, say it back to them when they’re finished and make any revisions, and then email them that. If they agree that’s what they meant, then I start working on it.

This still doesn’t quite work. I’ve had my spec change radically two or three times a sprint (two week block) or been informed they assumed certain things were just obvious parts of what they asked for. (Like the messaging = file transfer thing. That was uh, non-intuitive, though I should have seen that coming since most major messaging systems have it.) In the end, the most important thing is to make sure you get paid for it. If I’m getting money to sit at a keyboard and think, I’ll get over throwing out half the code I write.

If you want more advice on constructively dealing with it, I’m sure there are people here with more experience than I have. If you’re looking for commiseration, you have mine.