All of Screwtape's Comments + Replies

I'm not sure I understand the question.

Do you mean, what do I suggest doing when it's equally easy to add something new to the list vs fixing a ball that's been dropped?

I think this approach is best used when fixing a dropped ball is costly. Consider the example of taking fifteen children on a hike. Fixing the situation if you have fourteen children at the end of the hike is stressful.

I don't think it's (mostly) a question of fame, I think whether it works is a question of how weird/hard to pronounce it is, how hard you stick to it, and the local norms. "Screwtape" works passably well for me, but I also don't use it in the more ~white collar professional circles.

. . . Actually, I should add clothing to this list. 

I laughed, thank you for the excellent example.

I've swapped to calling this Anvil Shortages, which doesn't seem taken.

Work ticket systems are one of the main examples of this I've worked with, that's the right track! Early in my career I worked IT for a university, and the ticket system was core to how the IT department operated. Every user report should create a new ticket or be attached to an existing ticket. Every ticket should be touched ideally once a day unless it was scheduled for a future date, and if a ticket went untouched for a whole week then that indicated something had gone horribly wrong. That's because the failure we really wanted to avoid was something li... (read more)

Also having the four suits each having a different multiplier might be fun?

Yeah, setups where (for instance) Clubs are worth 2x, Hearts and Diamonds are worth 1x, and Spades are worth 1/2x would (I expect) accelerate the effect. The example in Planecrash talks about multipliers like 1.3 or 1.1 where the evaluation is closer, which I turned to an integer multiplier to make the math doable in an average person's head. 

I have a more complicated and playtested version of Jellychip I mean to publish in a few days :)

2plex
Maybe having exact evaluations not being trivial is not entirely a bug, but might make the game more interesting (though maybe more annoying)?

Yep, that seems right and that does seem suboptimal. 

I think checking for escaping the island at the end of game would fix that since people still need to survive ten turns. Alternately, raising the amount of Boat needed would stretch that out, and more playtesting could figure out what the right target is.

. . . Hrm. What if escaped players still need food and water for the duration of the game, and then have to save up if they want to escape early? Not needing shelter gives a gentle encouragement to go as soon as they can.

2Martin Randall
You could put the escape check at the beginning of the turn, so that when someone has 12 boat, 0 supplies, the others have a chance to trade supplies for boat if they wish. The player with enough boat can take the trade safely as long as they end up with enough supplies to make more boat (and as long as it's not the final round). They might do that in exchange for goodwill for future rounds. You can also tweak the victory conditions so that escaping with a friend is better than escaping alone. Players who pay cohabitive games as zero sum won't take those trades and will therefore remove themselves from the round early, which is probably fine. They don't have anything to do after escaping early, which can be a soft signal that they're playing the game wrong.

(Self review) I stand by this essay, and in particular I like having this essay to point to as an example of why some organizations are not holding the idiot ball quite as much as people might assume. This essay is somewhat self defense? I work like this most of the time these days.

Followup work on how to better juggle balls is useful, and basically leads into an existing field of management. If One Day Sooner is unusual startup mode, Never Drop A Ball is a very normal middle and end stage of many organizations, and for good reasons. It's also a genuinely ... (read more)

(Self review) I stand by this essay and think more people should read it, though they don't need to read it deeply. 

I think some people knew this kind of work and so this serves as a pointer to "yeah, that thing we did at my last company" and some people did not realize this was an option. Making people aware of potentially exciting options they could choose in life is (in my opinion) a good use of an essay. In my ideal world everyone would read something describing the One Day Sooner mindset as they were choosing their first careers so they could hav... (read more)

(Self review) I stand by this post, I think it's an important idea, I think not enough people are using this technique, and this adds nothing but a different way of writing something that was already in the rationalist canon.

If you do not sometimes stop, start a timer, think for five minutes, come to a conclusion and then move on, I believe you are missing an important mental skill and you should fix that. This skill helps me. I have observed some of the most effective people I know personally use this skill. You should at least try it.

You know what follow... (read more)

(Self review) Do I stand by this post? Eh. Kinda sorta but I think it's incomplete.

I think there's something important in truth-telling, and getting everyone on the same page about what we mean by the truth. Since everyone will not just start telling the literal truth all the time and I don't even particularly want them to, we're going to need to have some norms and social lubricant around how to handle the things people say that aren't literal truth. 

The first thing I disagree with when rereading it is sometimes even if someone is obviously and strai... (read more)

I think this essay is worth including in the Best Of LessWrong collection for introducing a good conceptual handle for a phenomenon it convinced me exists in a more general form than I'd thought.

It's talking about a phenomenon that's easy to overlook. I think the phenomenon is real; for a trivial example, look at any self reported graph of height and look at the conspicuous shortage at 5'11". It comes with lots of examples. Testing this is maddeningly tricky (it's hiding from you!) but doable, especially if you're willing to generalize from one or two exam... (read more)

I might be a niche example, but the Dark Forest Theory as applied to meetups was novel to me and affects how I approach helping rationality meetups. 

Sometimes they're not advertised for good reasons, even if those reasons aren't articulated. It sure does seem to make accurate claims about meetups from my observation, where when I notice an odd dearth of meetups in an area where it seems like there should be more meetups, sometimes I find out they exist they're just not as public and also nobody seems to have told the more frustrating quarter of the lo... (read more)

I love Fatebook as a user, and also this feels like an odd fit for the Best Of LessWrong collection.

I usually think of the Best Of LessWrong collection as being the best posts from a given year. The collection used to be physical books, printed on paper, which I could physically hand to someone. By that standard, this isn't very good. What exactly would someone do with this post if they read it in a book? It's kind of just a (well written) advertisement. The magic happens if they go to the website.

But man, the last few years have been a giant leap forward ... (read more)

I continue to be a fan of people trying to accomplish something in the world and reporting back on what happened. This is a good example of the genre, and on a subject near and dear to (part of) LessWrong's collective heart.

I confidently expect somebody will read a bunch of things on LessWrong, get excited about AI, and try to get the American government to Do Something. By default this attempt will not be particularly well aimed or effective, and every piece of information we can give on the obstacles will be useful. There have been updates since 2023 on ... (read more)

(Self review.) Bystander effect is fairly well known in the rationalist community. Quietly fading is not as widely recognized. Since writing this post, two people have told me and other people about projects they were dropping, specifically citing this post as the reason they said that aloud instead of just showing up less.

Mission (partially) accomplished.

Since crystalizing this concept, I've started paying more attention to 1. who owns a project and 2. when I last saw motion on that project. I stand by this post: it spotlights a real problem and makes a couple useful suggestions. 

I wish more people 1. tried practicing the skills and techniques they think are important as rationalists and 2. reported back on how it went. Thank you Olli for doing so and writing up what happened!

Being well calibrated is something I aspire to, and so the advice on particular places where one might stumble (pointing out the >90% region is difficult, pointing out that ones gut may get anchored on a particular percentage for no good reason, pointing out switching domains threw things off for a little) is helpful. I'm a little nervous about how changing... (read more)

The structure did change. I've gone ahead and added a SFLW file to reflect the new structure, using the description Andrew had for the First Saturday SFLW group. @Andrew Gaul if you want to tweak that description look for /_posts/2025-01-05-SFLW.md and change it as you need.

2Screwtape
Updated this post itself.

Well, thank you for filling the survey out. If you used to be around and aren't any more, I'm happy to have you in the dataset. 

I hope you get unsubscribed successfully, and best of luck in whatever you're up to now!

Thank you for taking it! It's designed to let people skip lots of questions if they want.

The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I'm going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I'm going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection.

Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual ... (read more)

(Self review)

Basically I stand by this post and I think it makes a useful addition to the conversation.

"Motte and bailey" is one of the pieces of rationalist lexicon that has wound up fairly widespread. It's also easy to misuse, because "America" or "Catholics" or "The military industrial complex" are made up of lots of different people who might legitimately different views. The countercharm is recognizing that, and talking to specific people. "Here's a way to be wrong, here's a way to be less wrong" seems a worthwhile addition to LessWrong.

Does it make a... (read more)

. . . Okay, I'll bite.

 

1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
9%
10%
11%
12%
13%
14%
15%
16%
17%
18%
19%
20%
21%
22%
23%
24%
25%
26%
27%
28%
29%
30%
31%
32%
33%
34%
35%
36%
37%
38%
39%
40%
41%
42%
43%
44%
45%
46%
47%
48%
49%
50%
51%
52%
53%
54%
55%
56%
57%
58%
59%
60%
61%
62%
63%
64%
65%
66%
67%
68%
69%
70%
71%
72%
73%
74%
75%
76%
77%
78%
79%
80%
81%
82%
83%
84%
85%
86%
87%
88%
89%
90%
91%
92%
93%
94%
95%
96%
97%
98%
99%
1%
99%

 

Edit: And-

1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
9%
10%
11%
12%
13%
14%
15%
16%
17%
18%
19%
20%
21%
22%
23%
24%
25%
26%
27%
28%
29%
30%
31%
32%
33%
34%
35%
36%
37%
38%
39%
40%
41%
42%
43%
44%
45%
46%
47%
48%
49%
50%
51%
52%
53%
54%
55%
56%
57%
58%
59%
60%
61%
62%
63%
64%
65%
66%
67%
68%
69%
70%
71%
72%
73%
74%
75%
76%
77%
78%
79%
80%
81%
82%
83%
84%
85%
86%
87%
88%
89%
90%
91%
92%
93%
94%
95%
96%
97%
98%
99%
1%
99%
Now, I don't suppose that LessWrong prediction API is documented anywhere?
2jimrandomh
Kinda. There's source code here and you can poke around the API in graphiql. (We don't promise not to change things without warning.) When you get the HTML content of a post/comment it will contain elements that look like <div data-elicit-id="tYHTHHcAdR4W4XzHC">Prediction</div> (the attribute name is a holdover from when we had an offsite integration with Elicit). For example, your prediction "Somebody (possibly Screwtape) builds an integration between Fatebook.io and the LessWrong prediction UI by the end of July 2025" has ID tYHTHHcAdR4W4XzHC. A graphql query to get the results: query GetPrediction { ElicitBlockData(questionId:"tYHTHHcAdR4W4XzHC") { _id predictions { createdAt creator { displayName } } } }

Thank you all for coming to Solstice! If you'd like to give any feedback, we have a form for that here: https://tinyurl.com/bos-solstice-survey.

Hello! I'm running the Unofficial LessWrong Community Survey this year, and we're down to the last week it's open. If you're reading this open thread, I think you're in the target audience. 

I'd appreciate if you took the survey

If you're wondering what happens with the answers, it gets used for big analysis posts like this one, the data gets published so you can use it to answer questions about the community, and it sometimes guides the decision-making of people who work or run things in the community. (Including me!)

Bounded Distrust is an important addition to my personal lexicon, and this is a decent explanation of how to use it with news organizations. Zvi is perhaps a bit cynical, but the thesis is in part that this level of cynicism is warranted.

I haven't been using Bounded Distrust as much when thinking about news organizations, but I do use it when thinking about other vectors for information. (Including people.) That's a bit odd, since the original essays (both Scott's and Zvi's) are very much about news agencies. The general lesson is something like, what ways... (read more)

Welcome to LessWrong! You might be interested in the Toyko Astral Codex Ten meetups, a group of rationalists who meet about once a month. I believe there's a branch that primarily uses Japanese as well as an English-speaking group. 

Where are you in Japan? I don't know of any community like this outside of Tokyo, but I know a few ways to find out.

1Yoshinori Okamoto
Thank you for your comment. We communicated via personal messages. Screwtape was very kind.  

One of the stated purposes of the LessWrong Review is to decide what posts stood the test of time, looking back at the last year. We have yet to do a LessWrong Review that looked back at the last decade, but wouldn't it be awesome if we did?

That's what this essay offers. It's short! I wish it had a little more data, or went into details like what nervous system training was tried (what about Yoga works?) but if the biggest complaint I have about an essay is 'I wish it was longer' that's a really good problem to have! 

I'd like to encourage people to wr... (read more)

(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That's a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I'd want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.

Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat informati... (read more)

Most LessWrong readers do not attend meetups, and this is basically useless to them. Some readers do attend meetups, which Ziz will not attend because the organizers are aware of this and are will keep Ziz out. Some organizers aren't aware, and this is a useful thing to be able to point to in that case, though since this was written describing a developing situation it would be kind of nice to have a conclusion or update somewhere near the top.

Overall, I wouldn't want this in the Best Of collection, but I do expect to link people to it in the future.

A year ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bF353RHmuzFQcsokF/cohabitive-games-so-far This post introduces the idea, motivation, and a bit of information about the game itself.

Four months ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xY3A8xy6ox5jzmCAm/release-optimal-weave-p1-a-prototype-cohabitive-game A playable version is released, with rules.

(Apologies for link formatting, I'm on mobile at the moment.)

2Raemon
I think it's fine to edit in "here's a link to the thing I shipped later" at the top and/or bottom and/or middle of the post.

My recommendation for this essay's inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong collection comes down to two questions.

  1. Are the places decorated like this actually that nice?
  2. Is this a useful guide for creating those spaces?

Having been to Lighthaven (Lightcone's venue) a lot over the last year, I think the answer to 1. is a straightforward yes. Lots of other people love Lighthaven. It's possible that this style doesn't work if you're putting less oomph into it than Lightcone put into Lighthaven. I've visited a couple of homes decorated like this and think the style wo... (read more)

I like this essay. I am not a paladin and do not particularly plan to become one. I do not think all the people setting out to maximize utility would stand behind this particular version of the rallying cry. 

But I do think paladins exist, I want them to have a rallying cry, and when it works — when they do manage to point themselves at the right target, and are capable of making a dent, then I appreciate that they exist and chose to do that. I also appreciate the "if you want to save the world, then here's how" framing.

I don't quite think someone coul... (read more)

In contrast, your article meandering for 11 paragraphs defining concepts that basically everyone already has installed before dropping the definition of cohabitive game in a paragraph that looks just like any of the others.

This is an excellent point and I've added a summary at the start, plus some headers. Thank you!

I want to take a moment and note that I'm currently approaching this cooperatively. (Yes, ironic given the subject.) I want the idea of cohabitive games to be in the LessWrong lexicon, I think you also want this, those are the articles we have ... (read more)

2Raemon
I'm not sure I understand what the topic is, but, flagging that you are encouraged to edit posts during the Review to make the better, more timeless versions of themselves.
2mako yass
I'm aware that that's quite normal, I do it sometimes too, I also doubt it's an innate limit, and I think to some extent this is a playful attempt to make people more aware of it. It would be really cool if people could become better at remembering the context of what they're reading. Context-collapse is like, the main problem in online dialog today. I guess game designers never stop generating challenges that they think will be fun, even when writing. Sometimes a challenge is frustrating, and sometimes it's fun, and after looking at a lot of 'difficult' video games I think it turns out surprisingly often whether it ends up being fun or frustrating is not totally in the designer's control, it's up to the player. Are they engaging deeply, or do they need a nap? Do they just want to be coddled all the way through? (Looking back... to what extent was Portal and the renaissance it brought to puzzle games actually a raising of the principle "you must coddle the player all the way through, make every step in the difficulty shallow, while making them feel like they're doing it all on their own", to what extent do writers also do this (a large extent!), and how should we feel about that? I don't think games have to secretly coddle people, I guess it's just something that a good designer needs to be capable of, it's a way of demonstrating mastery, but there are other approaches. EG: Demonstrating easy difficulty gradations in tutorials then letting the player choose their difficulty level from then on.) Trying to figure out what it would mean to approach something cooperatively and not cohabitively @_@ I feel like it would always be some kind of trick. The non-cohabitive cooperator invites us to never mind about building real accountability mechanisms, "we can just be good :)" they say. They invite us to act against our incentives, and whether they will act against theirs in return will remain to be seen. Let's say it will be cooperative because cooperation is also coha

I think this, or something like this, should be in a place of prominence on LessWrong. The Best Of collection might not be the place, but it's the place I can vote on, so I'd like to vote for it here.

I used "or something like this" above intentionally. The format of this post — an introduction of why these guidelines exist, short one or two sentence explanations of the guideline, and then expanded explanations with "ways you might feel when you're about to break the X Guideline" — is excellent. It turns each guideline into a mini-lesson, which can be broke... (read more)

The census is live

The post itself is here if you want a little more detail, but I thought I'd save you a click.

I really like cohabitive games. I enjoy playing this one. I'm somewhat mixed on this post in particular being in the Best Of LessWrong collection. Cohabitive Games So Far looks like it's doing two things; it's outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting, and it's describing one specific cohabitive game but not in enough detail to play it. 

For the first part (outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting) I prefer Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive. (Though I wrote Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive, so I mig... (read more)

4mako yass
I don't think that's a good criticism, those sections are well labelled, the reader is able to skip them if they're not going to be interested in the contents. In contrast, your article lacks that kind of structure, meandering for 11 paragraphs defining concepts that basically everyone already has installed before dropping the definition of cohabitive game in a paragraph that looks just like any of the others. I'd prefer if you'd opened with the definition, it doesn't really require a preamble. But labelling the Background and Definition sections would also resolve this. I think we should probably write another post in the future that's better than either. I'm not really satisfied with my definition. It clearly didn't totally work, given how many people posted games that are not cohabitive, but that could have just been unavoidable for various reasons, some quite tricky to resolve. The rules of P1 (now OW.1) aren't in a zip file, they're just a web page: https://dreamshrine.org/OW.1/manual.html I guess I'll add that to the article. This is why I didn't dwell on the rules in much depth. OW.1 was always intended as a fairly minimal (but also quite open-ended) example.

(Self Review) I stand by this post, and if the Best Of LessWrong posts are posts we want everyone in the community to have read then this seems worth the space.

Tapping out is a piece of rationalist jargon that has a definition in the LessWrong tags and has been used in the community for years, but doesn't really have a canonical post explaining why we use it. The tag definition is a good explanation of what it means and it's shorter, which is good. I think tapping out is a good and useful tool when having debates or discussions, and it's one that works bes... (read more)

This essay is an example of the ancient LessWrong genre, "dumb mistakes your brain might be making which feel obvious once someone points them out." I love this genre, and think You Don't Get To Have Cool Flaws should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

It's so easy to make this mistake! In fiction, complex and beloved characters have flaws. Fiction can set examples we try to live up to. Flaws are easier to emulate than virtues. I can't train as hard as Batman, and I can't be as wealthy as Batman, but I can brood! Brooding is easy! But the flaw isn'... (read more)

I'm glad I read this, and it's been a repeating line in my head when I've tried to make long term plans. I'd like this to be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

Even if you are doing something fairly standard and uncomplicated, there are likely multiple parts to what you do. A software engineer can look at a bunch of tickets, some code reviews, the gap where good documentation can be, and the deployment pipeline before deciding that the team is dropping the ball on documentation. A schoolteacher might look at the regular classes, the extracurricular pr... (read more)

I'd say non-theistic religions should mark "Athiest but spiritual."

I'm confident that's not the least principled way someone has answered the probability questions. I'm currently like asking people to come up with a number, even one they're pulling out of their rear, and explicitly mentioning N/As feels like it gets me fewer numbers to play with.

Thank you, both for taking the survey and for the appreciation!

How do you feel about pinning the census for a few days at some point this month?

I think this should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

This post exemplifies the virtue of scholarship, of looking at every field and skillset as one more source of information. It's well packaged into specific lessons and it comes from someone who can speak in both the Rationalist idiom and the local idiom. It's also on a subject many of us are working on: EA and LW nonprofits do work alongside 'normal' charities, and it's helpful to see their different views and frames. I'd be delighted by a dozen posts like this, field reports from other fields ... (read more)

I don't believe it's a reference to a particular post. Some people have fun as a group, whether partying or playing games together or just spending time showing each other cat pictures. Some ways to have fun as a group result in more fun than others, and people might try to test which ways have more fun.

9gjm
It seems like a thing that literally[1] everyone does sometimes. "Let's all go out for dinner." "OK, where shall we go?" As soon as you ask that question you're "optimizing for group fun" in some sense. Presumably the question is intending to ask about some more-than-averagely explicit, or more-than-averagely sophisticated, or more-than-averagely effortful, "optimizing for group fun", but to me at least it wasn't very clear what sort of thing it was intending to point at. [1] Almost literally.

You're welcome!

Last year I had a version of that question where (mimicking a question the LW team asked) I said I'd keep it private. Reading the answers felt nice, and I realized an anonymous but public version of that could be really nice for a lot of people.

I think the passphrase got introduced when there was a monetary reward attached at one point, and then reused for some prisoner's dilemma questions later.

Load More