Screwtape

Write a Thou­sand Roads to Rome

• 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?

The Fal­ling Drill

• Screwtape 13 Sep 2017 15:13 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: pepe_prime’s comment on: 2017 LessWrong Survey

  I have taken the survey. I don’t remember there being a public key question at the end of the last one though, which is a shame since that obviously means I don’t remember what mine was last time.

• Screwtape 8 Mar 2018 20:02 UTC

  21 points

  on: The Steam­punk Aesthetic

  I’m chuckling to myself as I read this because this morning there was heavy snow outside and my power was out, so I hiked partway up out of the valley I live in to get reception on my cell phone to call the office and find out whether it was open (it was) and then went back down shovel the shared parking lot and driveway with my neighbors so we could get our cars out, then halfway to work found that the road was blocked by a fallen tree so me and a few others who had stopped sawed it up and hauled it clear of the road (someone had a chainsaw in the back of their pickup thankfully) so we could get to where we were going. Is ruralpunk a word? If it isn’t I find I want to make it a word.

  This doesn’t happen every day, but I would guess I have a day like that around once a month. I’ve been considering moving to a city for access to better jobs, and the thought of growing unused to events like the above has been one of the factors that make me reluctant. Perhaps it’s an irrational appreciation for a rugged aesthetic, but I find I’m more cheerful after nature makes me solve some problems that involve grabbing something physical and working up a sweat.

• Screwtape 27 Sep 2021 13:47 UTC

  19 points

  on: Petrov Day 2021: Mu­tu­ally As­sured Destruc­tion?

  Today I learned that loss aversion is very weird.

  I had a code for this last year. I thought this game was cool, and I faithfully refrained from using them. Then today I saw this post, checked my email, and when I didn’t find any codes I noticed that I felt sad. I’m not deeply sad, to be clear, but I definitely am a little disappointed that I don’t have a string of numbers which have exactly one use which I have next to zero intention of ever using, that only two hundred people get, and which would be useless after a day. On reflection, this disappointment is obviously silly, and in particular the way this initially parsed as a thing being taken away from me is very silly.

  So yeah, that’s how my day is going so far. To those who got codes, thank you for not temporarily destroying a small part of the internet!

• Screwtape 28 Jun 2018 15:06 UTC

  19 points

  on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH

  Upped my donation to $10 via Patreon. Being on the far end of the country and being noticeably cash constrained conspire to make that number smaller than I’d prefer, but I want projects like this to work.

Run­ning a Ba­sic Meetup

• Screwtape 31 Jan 2018 14:51 UTC

  15 points

  on: An experiment

  My first stats teacher used the example of juvenile delinquency and ice cream sales, which rise and fall together. She gave us a few minutes to try and explain why this might be before pointing out that both of these rise dramatically during the summer, when it’s hot out and kids are out of school.

• Screwtape 2 May 2017 18:02 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: WalterL’s comment on: Open thread, May. 1 - May. 7, 2017

  My advice is always of the utmost sincerity, my dear Walterwood. The safest road to awful software is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. The duty of planning tomorrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. The truth is that wherever a developer has a meeting with a manager, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.

  Put simply; to decide what the best use case is, you must ask what use the Management wants to make of it and then do the opposite. We know that is ultimately what they will decide. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

  Should you continue to find reason to distrust me, perhaps at some meetup or another I might take the opportunity to have you for dinner. >:)

• 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 6 Dec 2017 1:40 UTC

  11 points

  on: Up­dates from Boston

  In most of my social groups, “pop” is equivalent to what you describe using “backthumb” for. This started with the programmers, who also use “push” when deliberately introducing a new temporary topic, and reached fixation.

Cal­ibra­tion Trivia

• Screwtape 16 Mar 2018 15:08 UTC

  10 points

  on: The Costly Co­or­di­na­tion Mechanism of Com­mon Knowledge

  Upvoted, and I wanted to specifically say that I appreciate you for writing this concept down where it can be easily and specifically pointed to in the future.

• Screwtape 27 Jun 2017 14:59 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Zarm’s comment on: Open thread, June 26 - July 2, 2017

  I live in a tiny rural town, and get the majority of my meat from farmer’s markets. Having been raised on a similar farm to the ones I buy from, I’m willing to bet those cows are happy a greater percentage of their lives than I will be. I recognize this is mostly working because of where I live and the confidence I have in how those farms are run. In the same way that encouraging fewer animals to exist in terrible conditions (by being vegan) is good I feel that encouraging more animals to exist in excellent conditions (by eating meat) is good. I don’t stop eating meat (though I do eat less) when I go on trips elsewhere even though I’m aware I’m probably eating something that had a decidedly suboptimal life because switching on and off veganism would be slow.

  That’s my primary argument. My secondary, less confident position is that since I prefer existing in pain and misery to not existing, my default assumption should be that animals prefer existing in pain and misery to not existing. I’m much less confident here, since I’m both clearly committing the typical mind fallacy and have always had some good things in my life no matter how awful most things were. Still, when I imagine being in their position, I find myself preferring to exist and live rather than not have existed. (Though I prefer existing and not being in pain the superior outcome by a wide margin!)

Cam­bist Booking

• Screwtape 9 Oct 2017 13:56 UTC

  9 points

  on: HOWTO: Screw Up The LessWrong Sur­vey and Bring Great Shame To Your Family

  First, thank you for admitting a screwup and therefore making it easier for the next person to do so.

  Second, I think the survey is valuable and useful both for the community at large and to a personal project of mine, enough to donate my own time into it. What kind of people would you want to answer your SOS? I can make websites and theme things, I can do really basic stats analysis, I don’t mind data entry so if the best way to import questions to Google Forms is to retype it I can cheerfully do that. I’ve got a decent amount of experience with Forms, which includes a useful trick for really long surveys.

• Screwtape 1 Nov 2017 20:01 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: tristanm’s comment on: An Equil­ibrium of No Free Energy

  Counterargument, depending on what you view the goal of the rationality movement is: If we want to raise the sanity waterline and get the benefits from having a lot of people armed with new insights, we need to be able to explain those insights to people. Take literacy- there’s a real benefit to getting a majority of a population fluent in that technique, something distinct from what you get from having a few people able to read. Imagine if the three rationality techniques most important to you were so widespread that it would be genuinely surprising if a random adult on the street wasn’t capable with them. What would the last year have looked like if every adult knew that arguments are not soldiers, or that beliefs should pay rent? (My social media would be a much more pleasant place if everyone on it knew that nobody is perfect but everything is commensurable.)

  We teach math by starting with counting, then addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and so on until differential equations or multivariable calculus or wherever ones math education stops. One can argue that we teach math badly (and I would be pretty sympathetic to that argument) but I don’t think “too many easy to understand lessons that teach only one new insight” is the problem. I might go so far as to say we need multiple well written articles on the most important insights, written in a variety of styles to appeal to a wide variety of reader.

• 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 ;) )

Dissent Collusion