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.
70 is the number I got when I asked a rationalist who runs far more surveys than I do.
Most years the LW census itself asks about how long folks found it, and last year on average they think it should be a little shorter.
Heads up, I'm planning to close the census sometime tomorrow. You can take it here if you haven't yet!
Post- solstice survey link! If you have a moment, I'd appreciate if you took it. https://tinyurl.com/bos-solstice-survey
I think this is an excellent essay, and I think approximately everyone should read it or something covering the same topic by the time they're twenty.
It's at least adjacent to LessWrong's favourite topics. (Consider Money: the Unit of Caring for a start.) Especially as the rationalist and adjacent spaces continue to professionalize, and continue to pay less than standard market wages elsewhere, it's a good thing to watch as either manager or employee. And since so much of the adjacent community runs on volunteers helping out because they want to, it's a useful question for anyone volunteering as well.
But ignore the LessWrong connection for a moment: It's just good career advice, of the sort I'd hope young bright people everywhere would run into at one point or another. You really can get paid in "hundreds of people applaud you regularly" or "you get to find out secrets of the universe's laws before anyone else" if you want that. You can also get paid in cold, hard cash with which to purchase goods and services.
"What do you actually want to be paid in, and are you getting it?" has entered my list of short questions to ask about basically every project I work on these days. I think it would also be a good addition for everyone else to ask before embarking on a project. That makes it worthy of the Best Of LessWrong collection.
Half-baked idea free to good home: Calibration trivia for charity.
The event has an array of charities available to pick. Each person or team puts up a stake. They answer trivia questions with answers and how sure they are that they're right. At the end of the game, they get back some amount of money based on their brier score, with more calibrated teams getting back more of their stake. Whatever team has the most correct answers gets to pick where all the money that wasn't returned goes. Ties on correct answers get broken by calibration. Winning team maybe gets a free hat or something.
I don't know if this has any memetic fitness compared to existing charity drives.
Would that be unreasonable and irresponsible?
How do I heart react an entire post?
I have been interpreting it as "weird!" when Ray says it.
Self review.
I still like this post. I think it's a good metaphor with a strong visual component, one that makes pretty intuitive sense. It also highlights a problem that happens at kind of the worst frequency; issues that happen all the time people get bothered enough to fix, issues that never happen may legitimately aren't worrying about that much, but the ladder basically hits an organization once each generation. (However long a "generation" is for that org- student groups go faster than church leadership.)
Upon review, I think it pairs well with Melting Gold. The ladder isn't just for organizations; any contribution you're making to the world, that you have to put ongoing effort into maintaining, is worth spending at least five minutes thinking about what the ladder is like for someone new starting out.
I think this is worth putting in the Best Of collection, largely on the grounds that at least one post every year should be talking about why your on-ramps are important otherwise people forget to maintain the on-ramps. I wouldn't want two such posts, but one seems correct.
Today in Boston Meetup News I tried to schedule a rationalist board game meetup, and realized I accidentally double scheduled with another event. The problem was
I am not going to claim that Boston matches the Californian Bay for volume of rationalist/EA events, but I do believe I could hang out with half a dozen to a couple dozen folks of this sort every night of the week here if I wanted.