All of Screwtape's Comments + Replies

I think of Ziz and co as less likely than 2std out, for about the reasons you give. I tend to give 200 as the rough number of organizers and groups, since I get a bit under that for ACX Everywhere meetups in a given season. If we're asking per-event, Dirk's ~5,000 number sounds low (off the top of my head, San Diego does frequent meetups but only the ACX Everywheres wind up on LessWrong, and there are others like that) but I'd believe 5,000~10,000.

And I wouldn’t really try to figure out how to be happy by looking at what religions say about it.

People have been thinking about the problem for thousands of years, most of the written answers we've got come from religion and philosophy. Maybe they're all terrible answers but virtue of scholarship, sometimes I read a book and check.

(Which is—I’m sorry to say it—perfectly illustrated by your whole “let’s look at the Wikipedia page for each religion and see how many times it mentions ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’” thing. Come on! Obviously that is a nonsensical th

I disagree with #1

Okay, let me try starting from before that point then. 

There's a bunch of things commonly referred to as emotions. Happiness is one. Anger is another. Sadness is a third. This list is not exhaustive but there's lots of lists of emotions, here's one.

Have you ever felt any of these, such that you could say "gosh, I'm really angry right now" as a fact about the world?

basically agree with #3, and agree with what #4 says but almost certainly not with what you mean by it. (I also—obviously—disagree with the notion that these things form so

It sounds like you've got the same thing going on that the book is talking about, and I'm either labeling a different thing "compassion" in my head than you and the Dalai Lama are talking about or something else is going on.

Possible but from reading the book I think that interpretation is unlikely to be correct. The authors seemed to think empathy itself brought some joy even in these cases.

Well… hard to say. The LW mods now pass that threshold^[1], but then again they’re not beginning now; they began eight years ago.

My sense is that if the mods had waited to start trying to moderate things until they met this threshold, they wouldn't wind up ever meeting it. There's a bit of, if you can't bench press 100lbs now, try benching 20lbs now and you'll be able to do 100lbs in a couple years, but if you just wait a couple years before starting you won't be able to then either.

Ideally there's a way to speed that up and among the ideas I have for that ... (read more)

. . . okay, wait, looking at your other comments below in this thread was this supposed to be a joke?

The ham sandwich replacement works pretty well in my head, I don't understand the Olympic medal analogy, and the lottery tickets thing is confusing to me. I agree people can be mistaken about what they want (though I don't default to assuming that) and I'm confused what you think a lot of people actually want and mistake for wanting to be happy? We seem to have some kind of communication problem or alternately pretty different experiences of happiness, and I'm not sure what's going on here. I'm glad we're on the same page about thinking by the clock and be... (read more)

Largest world religions by followers: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Folk Religion. I know Christianity decently, and while joy is something you're sometimes supposed to get out of a life lived in accordance with God it isn't the point. (There are many Christian variants, I haven't dug into every interpretation, I think I'm generally right here.) Islam, I thought I read the Quran at one point but admit I can't remember much of anything. For Hinduism I read the Bhagavad Gita and remember the outline and some choice quotes, I assert that happiness ... (read more)

Do you want to be happy?

"No" is an answer. Maybe you want personal growth, maybe you want the accomplishment of some goal, maybe you want a ham sandwich. If you did want to be happy, and commenting on LessWrong posts did not make you happy, then I think you should consider what you're doing for a couple minutes then go do something else which will make you happier.

Lots of people want to be happy. Uh, citation needed and I don't have one. I think actively pursuing happiness is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people... (read more)

Er, sorry, I think you might’ve misread my comment? What I was saying was that the more seriously the people with the power and authority take the problem, the better it is. (I think that perhaps you got the direction backwards from how I wrote it? Your response would make sense if I had said “directly proportional”, it seems to me.)

"And the severity of the failure will be inversely proportional to how seriously the people with the power and authority take this problem, and to how much effort they put into addressing it."

Hrm. Yes, I seem to have read it di... (read more)

I disagree your scenario is more realistic. 

“Now let’s say that the system is already full of bad actors (as it probably is). They have considered what and who might stop them, and what they might do about it. The system will, of course, be corrupt, and the people running that system will be horrible or incompetent. It is an obvious, straightforward move to promote memes that prevent this from being rectified.”

I think that happens sometimes, and higher pressure scenarios are more likely to be targets for this. Most of my disagreement is that I think m... (read more)

I'm trying to come up with people that I think actually reach the standard you're describing. I think I know maybe ten, of which two have any time or interest in handling meetup conflicts. 

I do agree there's some big failures that can happen when the people with authority to solve the problem take it very seriously, put a lot of effort into addressing it, and screw up. I don't agree that relationship is inversely proportional; if I imagine say, a 0 effort organizer who does nothing vs a 0.1 effort organizer who only moderates to say "shut up or leave"... (read more)

I would be delighted to have the social equivalent of a zero trust conflict resolution system that everyone who interacted with it could understand and where the system could also maintain confidentiality as needed. I'm in favour of the incremental steps towards that I can make. In the abstract, I agree the procedure for evaluating advice should work even if it comes from bitter enemies. I do not think my personal evaluation procedure is currently robust enough to handle that, though tsuyoku naritai, someday maybe it will be.

The main context I encounter th... (read more)

That is not the argument I'm trying to make.

The argument I'm trying to make is that conflict resolution is hard in a particular way that approximately nothing else in running events or communities is hard; it's potentially adversarial, therefore taking the advice of people with strongly held and seemingly sensible advice can be a trap.

The bullet pointed personas are not a load bearing part of this thesis. If it would help, try dropping everything from "let's be reductive" to "what they might do about it". I think the only other part I'm directly referencin... (read more)

Not sure how referential "you" vs general "you" you're using when you're talking about assuming some "you" is the KGB. I do think it's useful to build a system which does not assume the watchman is perfectly trustworthy and good. In my own case, one of the first things I did once I started to realize how tricky this part of my role might be was write down a method for limited auditing of myself. That said:

Your own approach and policies should work unproblematically even if everyone assumes that you are basically the KGB. (This is especially true if you are

Like I said, I don't have a solution. At least, not one I'm confident and certain of. I have other essays in the pipeline with (optimistically) pieces of it.

I don't think it's doomed. Most security experts a bank would reasonably hire are not bank robbers, you know? I assume that's true anyway, I'm not in that field but somehow my bank account goes un-robbed.

Checking where wildly different spheres agree seems promising. The source of advice here that I trust the most comes from a social worker who I knew for years who hadn't heard of the rationalist commun... (read more)

And yet I notice that the view that “people who have opinions about how [whatever] should be done are unusually likely to be bad actors who want me to do [whatever] in such a way as to benefit them, therefore I should be suspicious of their motives and suggestions” is memetically adaptive. Whenever you come across this idea, it is to your benefit to immediately adopt it—after all, it means that you will thenceforth need to spend less effort evaluating people’s suggestions and opinions, and have a new and powerful reason to reject criticism. And the idea pr

In a sense, Scott and I have the power to make decisions based on whatever kind and level of knowledge we want. I could go to Scott and say something like hey, I've got a bad vibe here, zero Verifiable Documented Evidence but it's an intuition, lets permanently and publicly ban this person. Or skip going to Scott- I think I only loop him in on ~10% of conflicts I'm aware of.

How much do you trust my intuition? How much do I trust it?

I trust local ACX organizers a lot. If someone comes to me and says the local ACX organizer banned them from the local meetup,... (read more)

I think context clues do usually make the difference between signal as in cell signal vs. kodo clear. I'm less confident that context will usually make the difference between signal as in signal and the noise vs. kodo clear. Most conversations I have with other people where I'd want to use it, I expect they won't have this concept and it's not worth pausing whatever conversation we were having to explain kodo. 

(Like, prior to me writing this up I think there were maybe a hundred people in the world who'd heard these terms used this way, because there ... (read more)

Signal feels overloaded to me and kodo seems like a much more narrow concept.

"I've got pretty good cell signal." "The elite spend a lot of time virtue signalling." "The castaways used smoke signals to get rescued." "Careful configuration is required to prevent signal interference between network nodes." "I think there's a pretty good signal in the polling data." "Ted's not actually being mean to me, he's just counter-signalling."

I'd basically agree that kodo is a subcategory of signal, in the same way that chicken is a subcategory of bird. The narrower con... (read more)

I love a good conlang. This one feels like an interesting start, though I'll be upfront and say I don't think this is a bottleneck on anything AI related.

Some thoughts and questions, in no particular order:

• "Here's how words are made" is a start. What's the grammar like? I think that's where a lot of ambiguity creeps in to language.
• Am I allowed to stop an encoding partway? For instance, am I allowed to say kakasu meti su to just mean noun, it's a fruiting plant in the Rosaceae family, or do I have to keep going to be grammatically correct?
• I kind of like th

Debbie's particular shape is arranged in part to isolate honesty and predictability as useful. If I'd just had her hiding bad things and confabulating good things I'd worry the takeaway would be solely that doing bad things or having a bad average was the problem, so I set her up such that the average stayed put and the curve just flattened out. I think the individual pieces do make sense though, if not in that particular combination.

Hiding good actions happens due to humbleness or status regulation or shyness or just because it's private. 

• A church ne

Frontpage is mostly what the admins and mods think is worth frontpaging, plus what users upvote. It's also a positional good, there can only be so many things on the front page. This is a more specific and useful question though! Yeah, if the LW team frontpaged more AI governance and less of everything else, and the average user upvoted more AI governance and less of everything else, the frontpage would have more AI governance on it. I wouldn't be a fan, but I'd understand the move that was the goal. My understanding is that's not the goal.

Not having a use... (read more)

I don't have the technical AI Safety skillset myself. My guess is to show up with specific questions if you need a technical answer, try and make a couple of specific contacts you can run big plans past or reach out to if you unexpectedly get traction, and use your LessWrong presence to establish a pointer to you and your work so people looking for what you're doing can find you. That seems worthwhile. After that, maybe crosspost when it's easy? Zvi might be a good example, where it's relatively easy to crosspost between LessWrong and Substack, though he's... (read more)

It might be useful for you to taboo "LessWrong" at least briefly.

I have a spiel that may turn into a post someday about how communities aren't people, the short version being that if you ask "why doesn't the community do X?" the answer is usually that no individual in the community took it upon themselves to be the hero. Other times, someone did, but the result didn't look like the community doing X it looks like individuals doing X.

Is the question "why does the average user on this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?" Half of Le... (read more)

I'll speak up for notecards: I use binder clips to sort them by category or date once in a while. While they are a bit small for complex or detailed drawings, in a pinch you can lay them slightly overlapping (perhaps with a little tape on the back) and get as big a sheet as you want. They won't replace my sketchbook for doing portraiture anytime soon, but that's a minority of my paper time.

Overall, I love this post and I like hearing other people's approaches to paper!

This post feels like it may have been written in response to some specific interpersonal drama. If it was, then I'd like to make it clear that I have absolutely no idea what it was and therefore no opinion on it. I just think this is a useful concept in general. 

Thumbs up, I appreciate knowing it lands even for people with no idea of the specific cases.

Other than the murder thing, I'm talking about something I've seen more than once. Like I said in the post, part of what I'm supposed to do for ACX meetups is handle complaints, which creates some unusu... (read more)

Basically agreed.

Though also relevant is the degree of maliciousness required and what the subject might get out of it. In the "bobcat instead of office chair" example, this is pretty willful willingness to cause physical harm and the sender doesn't really get anything out of it other than sadistic kicks and making the world much weirder. If the sender sent a much cheaper chair model, there's a less weird motivation (they keep the change) and there's less extra work involved.

I'm going to note I'm having a little trouble parsing your sentences here.

Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.

I think the thing you're saying is that you downvoted because you think instead of writing this essay, I should have told a specific person that I think they're being some kind of jerk (mailing metaphorical bobcats) to a small number of people while being nice to the majority of people. Further, that I'm incorrect about how bad the jerkishness is.... (read more)

Yep, and also as things scale you just get less information about everyone. 

An random local meetup might fit in one room, sometimes splitting into two rooms so it's easier to have multiple conversations. I can have line of sight to everyone at once and hear it if voices start getting raised. With meetups in ten cities, I can at least wave at most attendees, and have had a couple hours of conversation with the organizers.  With meetups in a hundred cities, I have only demographic guesses about who the attendees are, and it takes time and effort to... (read more)

Somewhat agreed. 

I'm trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs - replace "one of them has three good friends" with "one of them paid three people" - where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don't know that it's my first assumption; I currently think "Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people" happens more often than "Frank is coordinating a bun... (read more)

Huh. That article does not have as much information as I want on how that election process works, but I'll swap to William The Conqueror as an example. Thanks for pointing it out.

It's the second example I've had to swap which probably should dock me some kind of points here, though I still feel pretty good about the overall thesis.

Even if a skill isn't as useful if you're the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don't have it.

Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I'm pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It's a... (read more)

If I try this again next year I plan to use the exact same text and values on both sides, which hopefully will clear up most of that kind of issue. It doesn't really fix marginal value, but I'm not sure that's fatal to this kind of analysis- I can quote a reasonable price for an apple even though my marginal value of apples drops very fast by the time I hit three digits of apples. I could try and fix this by picking things I think people value vaguely the same but then we miss out on catching scope insensitivity. 

11.2% is if I remove the CFAR attendees. 36.8% is if I remove the non-attendees. Possibly this is a backwards way of setting things up but I think it's right?

Say I have a general population and I know how many pushups they can do on average (call this Everyone Average), and I remove everyone who goes to the gym and see how many pushups those remaining can do on average  (Call this Gym-Removed Average) and then I go back to the general population again this time removing everyone who doesn't go to the gym (Call this No-Gym-Removed Average.) 

This i... (read more)

No, I think I'm actually just wrong here and River is correct. I don't know how I wound up with the clockwise rule in my head but I just checked the new driver's pamphlet and it's first to the intersection. Updated.

but predicted that it was instead about sensitivity to subtle changes in the wording of questions.

If I try this again next year I'm inclined to keep the wording the same instead of trying to be subtle.

Regarding the dutch book numbers: it seems like, for each of the individual-question presentations of that data, you removed the outliers. When performing the dutch book calculations, however, it seems like you keep the outliers in.

Yep. Well, in the individual reports I reported the version with the outliers, and then sometimes did another pass without outlie... (read more)

Hrm. I guess what would be helpful here would be a sense of the range; the average briers floated around .20 to .23, and I don't have a sense of whether that's a tight clustering with a bit of noise or a meaningful difference. To use running a mile as a comparison, differences of seconds mostly aren't important (except at high levels) but differences of minutes are, right?

If Other is larger than I expect, I think of that as a reason to try and figure out what the parts of Other are. Amusingly enough for the question, I'm optimistic about solving this by letting people do more free response and having an LLM sift through the responses.

Thank you! I felt quite clever setting it up.

Yeah, I should probably add a bit at the start or end of that section that everything in it is potentially selection effect. I don't know how to look at the thing I'm curious about without that.

Thinking out loud: If you get a random selection of people from the Pushup Club and count how many pushups they can do, then do the same for general population, the difference could be selection effect. People who like doing pushups are more likely to go to pushup club in the first place, and more likely to stick with it. But I can't realistically pay a bunch of Mec... (read more)

No, I think that's correct. 

There's 107 people who answered above 200, 21 who answered exactly 200, and 113 people who answered below 200. The second quartile (aka the median) is 200. But nobody guessed a negative number, so the people who guessed low aren't pulling the mean down that much. Meanwhile 33 people guessed 1000 or higher, and they can yank the mean a lot without doing that much to the median. If you're asking people to generate numbers, you tend to get whole number quartiles because nobody guesses there's 100.5 stations.

Imagine a the set [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,100,100]. The average is ~23.444, but the median is 2. 

Or have I misunderstood the thing that you think needs to be corrected?

Wouldn't that get rid of all of the table of contents?

Ideally I'd have a hierarchy of headings. I think what's happening is it picks up some (but not all) lines that are entirely bold, and treats those as a sort of Heading 4.

Future Survey Discussion thread

A Screwtape Point (and upvotes) to whoever can tell me how to fix the table of contents.

That's just plain unfortunate.

Huh. Let me check with the local organizer and see if they have an update.

Ooh, please share the butter beer recipe? 

I was leaning towards reading part of Dumbledore's letter in 119. There are a lot of funny, silly lines I want to quote throughout the day but this piece is short and poignant. 

There can only be one king upon the chessboard.

There can only be one piece whose value is beyond price.

That piece is not the world, it is the world's peoples, wizard and Muggle alike, goblins and house-elves and all.

While survives any remnant of our kind, that piece is yet in play, though the stars should die in heaven.

And if that

What shape is the screen? 

This one is probably my favourite for an event banner.