Screwtape

• Screwtape 2 Feb 2025 5:59 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Perry Cai’s comment on: Never Drop A Ball

  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.

• Screwtape 2 Feb 2025 5:39 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: False­hoods you might be­lieve about peo­ple who are at a ra­tio­nal­ist meetup

  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.

False­hoods you might be­lieve about peo­ple who are at a ra­tio­nal­ist meetup

• Screwtape 29 Jan 2025 18:01 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Anvil Problems

  I laughed, thank you for the excellent example.

• Screwtape 29 Jan 2025 17:58 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Anvil Problems

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

Cal­ibra­tion Practice

• Screwtape 23 Jan 2025 17:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Never Drop A Ball

  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 like “the projector in room 417 hasn’t been working for two weeks, the professors can’t show slides, and nobody in IT knows about this.” It’s pretty easy for that to happen.

  Bug tracking can be a little different, as software is a bit more likely to say ‘eh, we don’t care about that bug, mark it as Won’t Fix/​leave it on the backlog indefinitely.’ My guess is this is a matter of asymmetric payoffs/​counting up vs counting down. Or a matter of department. Some departments are going to weigh new features equally against fixing bugs, while your Q&A team is going to have a different institutional view.

  how do these two different approaches differ in their approach to delegation? My hunch is that Never Drop A Ball delegates by finding someone who can do “Never Drop A Ball” and then assign them to some “zone” and basically play “zone defense”...

  Yeah, Never Drop A Ball delegation is often by category. To use the school field trip example, it’s straightforward to say the first grade teacher is in charge of getting all the first graders back safe, the second grade teacher is in charge of getting all the second graders back safe, and so on. A convention might have a treasurer (in charge of never dropping a reimbursement request or payment that needs to be made) and a tech lead (in charge of never losing a projector or microphone) and a community safety contact (in charge of never dropping a harassment complaint.) And like you said about higher management, the principal or convention chair are the people who catch problems that don’t cleanly fit a category and operates as the fallback for lower levels. The main fail case here is when a problem is doesn’t have someone obviously on that zone. One way to try and fix that is to say all unhandled problems are the domain of the organization President/​CEO/​Director, though this comes with its own problems.

  From what I’ve observed, delegating One Day Sooner works best with tasks.

  Examples:

  • The CTO of a company picks a software engineer or team lead, and says “We don’t currently have a mobile version of the website. I’m assigning that to you; get it done ASAP. Use the desktop version for copy and as a style guide. Tell me what resources you need and I’ll make sure you get them.”

  • As a convention is opening up, the organizer realizes they don’t have any lanyards. They ask the organizer group chat whether anyone is free, someone volunteers, and then the organizer says “awesome, we need at least five hundred, ideally they’re mostly black but with a couple hundred of other colours.”

  • The overall commander of a military operation picks a military company, and says “I want a base established in this area. I’m assigning it to you, get it done by next week. Tell my staff if you need any special equipment, here’s your liaison with the air force if you need them.”

  (I have way more experience with software engineering and convention running than military exercises, if someone shows up and says that’s not at all how the military works then probably I’m just wrong.)

  It occurs to me that a small for-profit might plan to have the CEO apply One Day Sooner and then the COO Never Drops A Ball...By contrast, once a giant source of profit has been found … I would guess that the CEO should be doing this Never Drop A Ball thing, while some other person (the CSO? the CTO? the CFO? all of them aimed at different projects the CEO thinks are important?) does One Day Sooner.

  If the small for-profit is sufficiently small, I expect everyone in the organization is in One Day Sooner mode almost all of the time. Someone should have their eye on some important paperwork that must get filed, but most of the energy should be on the mission goal. (It would not surprise me at all if there are otherwise successful startups that, sometime in year 3, had to ask “wait, who filed the taxes for this last year?” followed by a quiet expletive.) This is going to vary based on the purpose and scale though. Like, I think a community hospital is generally in Never Drop A Ball mode. There just isn’t a way to sprint really fast, work super hard, and fix all the broken bones before taking a rest. Someone’s going to walk in ten minutes after you sent the last patient home with a new broken bone.

  I currently don’t think there’s a generic answer here, it’s going to vary based on what you’re trying to do and how big you’re organization is. If I had to guess, I’d guess an ideal division is the CEO in One Day Sooner mode, and their executive assistant in Never Drop A Ball mode.

  What about CEOs that aren’t in either mode?

  I mean, I’m cheerfully willing to call these two modes a false but useful dichotomy, and there’s other ways to work. Off the top of my head, Maker vs Manager Schedules; and like Maker vs Manager, sometimes making the distinction clear to people helps them understand.

  That got a bit long, but I hope it helps! Thank you for the commentary :)

• Screwtape 17 Jan 2025 21:39 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: plex’s comment on: Six Small Co­hab­itive Games

  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 :)

• Screwtape 17 Jan 2025 21:31 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: Six Small Co­hab­itive Games

  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.

Six Small Co­hab­itive Games

• Screwtape 15 Jan 2025 20:44 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: Never Drop A Ball

  (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 superior way for many groups to work. (Consider a hospital emergency room. Dr. House going deep into one patient’s medical minutia is not as good as making sure that zero people have unsterilized and unbandaged bleeding wounds.) Having a shorter pointer is useful, though probably this could be made shorter and serve as a somewhat better pointer.

  Followup on when and how to set balls down would be useful. Someone else should write that, I’m rubbish at it =P

• Screwtape 15 Jan 2025 20:30 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: One Day Sooner

  (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 have it in mind as a possible trait jobs could have. Is that trait positive or negative? Depends on the person!

  I don’t know if it’s LessWrong Best Of material, but given the number of people who work in this manner that work in the community I think it’s good to have some term for it in the water supply.

  Best when paired with Never Drop A Ball.

• Screwtape 14 Jan 2025 23:04 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Think­ing By The Clock

  (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 followup work I want? I want a dozen different modes of this idea. A youtube video. The audio version is great. The fictional version in HPMOR is great. Can we get a goofy videogame that makes you use the pause button well? (I tried to get at this with Troll Timers. https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​fCg3pLZqthXsGznHP/​​troll-timers) I should try rewriting this as a rousing speech. It’d be cool to have it as a catchy tune. Maybe someone should tiktok the sucker.

  I’m not saying it’s the most important idea! Just, you know, it’s broadly applicable and any mistake you make by not thinking for five minutes when you are not actually under time pressure is a stupid mistake that makes beisutsukai-san disappointed in you.

  If the Best Of LessWrong collection is just for things that add to the conversation, this post doesn’t belong there. I’d give it a small positive vote if I could vote on it. On the other hand if nobody else has gotten a post about this concept into the Best Of LessWrong collection yet, and some newcomers might just read the Best Of LessWrong posts, then I do kinda want something on this topic to get in there.

• Screwtape 14 Jan 2025 22:44 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: In Defense of Parselmouths

  (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 straightforwardly feeding me bullshit, I keep trying to tell the truth. Sometimes I try even harder to be precise and truthful. In a conversation with friends, I might say “that game’s no fun” when the true and accurate statement is “I don’t find that game fun.” In a heated internet argument, I think it’s useful to check my stance and use the latter kind of statement, even if the other person is saying things like “everyone who doesn’t like that game is a moron.”

  Short of a complete guide to Truth, I’d settle for a practical “Here’s how Screwtape regards the truth, read it and you’ll understand when he’d say false things.” This essay falls short of that.

  I’d love more things in this genre. Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases and The Onion Test For Personal And Institutional Honesty are both good examples of the genre. Even personal versions seem useful.

  I think that makes this a replaceable essay. It would be fine in a Best Of collection, but it’s not adding too much other than a few intuition pumps.

• Screwtape 14 Jan 2025 22:28 UTC

  5 points

  3

  on: So­cial Dark Matter

  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 examples you may have an unusually good vantage point on.

  I’ve taken to thinking of this as paired with Dark Forest Theories (https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​xDNyXGCDephBuNF8c/​​dark-forest-theories). If you look around and notice a gap in the world, is that because there’s nothing there, or because what would be there is concealed from you?

  If there’s a followup post I’d love to see, that post would be on how to observe or detect the dark matter. That would be an anti-inductive game in many ways, but I expect general principles might exist- I’ve taken to looking at survey data with an eye towards “hrm, there’s a dip or break in that line there- would I expect that spot to be Social Dark Matter?”

  If someone was involved more directly working with dark matter subjects, this post would be more material to them I think. For me, it’s mostly overkill, but a concept I keep in my back pocket for when it’s needed.

• Screwtape 14 Jan 2025 22:19 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Dark For­est Theories

  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 local community.

  It’s a counterintuitive sort of evidence, but it is evidence, and this essay helped me see it clearer. It feels related to Social Dark Matter (https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/​​social-dark-matter) if not exactly the same point and while Social Dark Matter is the more thorough explanation, Dark Forest Theories is more concise.

  The followup work I’d like to see is on how to spot these lacuna, and to distinguish “there’s nothing visible here because something is ‘hunting’ the visible examples” and “there’s nothing visible here because there’s actually nothing here.”

  Overall, I’d be happy to have this in the Best Of LessWrong collection. A short, well written essay that introduces a new idea you can keep in your back pocket to make sense of the world is a worthwhile addition in my book.

• Screwtape 14 Jan 2025 22:06 UTC

  12 points

  0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing Fate­book: the fastest way to make and track predictions

  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 in prediction tools, haven’t they? Polymarket and Kalshi showing up in news broadcasts and respectable journalism, Manifold Markets having honest to goodness conferences, and here, quietly announced in a LessWrong post, is a tool that’s starting to feel as much a reflex and habit to me as Google Search and my pomodoro timer. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, a clean, fast, simple prediction tool, and the thought of going back to the google form I used to use makes me sad.

  Take your +4 vote. It’s a very well written advertisement for a product more people should use. If the LW team does print more Best Of LessWrong books, may I suggest having one page that literally just says “THESE PEOPLE USE FATEBOOK AND YOU SHOULD TOO” with a bunch of signatures underneath? (Half joking- but only half.)

• Screwtape 12 Jan 2025 21:45 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Speak­ing to Con­gres­sional staffers about AI risk

  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 government awareness and response to AI, though I suspect the core information in this post about how to get in contact with people remains unchanged. It might even be cause area agnostic; if I wanted to talk to congress people about education or biosecurity, my guess is having draft proposals ready would be useful.

  As novel is as the Dialogue feature was, I’d be interested in a tightened up version of this that cut to the key points and takeaways. I’d also be interested in hearing from people who’ve done policy work whether this seems accurate and whether it leaves anything important out- better yet from people who tried using this as a guide! Overall, yeah, I weakly think this is worth including in a Best Of LessWrong collection.

• Screwtape 12 Jan 2025 21:24 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Loudly Give Up, Don’t Quietly Fade

  (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.

• Screwtape 11 Jan 2025 5:10 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Take­aways from cal­ibra­tion training

  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 question category apparently lead to poorer calibration for a while. It makes sense why that would be the case, but my ideal art of rationality would work well across domains. Otherwise, why not study that particular domain more? I do like the application to day-to-day problems; “do I have peanut butter at home or did I run out?” is the kind of thing I run into on at least a daily basis.

  I’d love to have a dozen such reports from a dozen people’s attempts, both to see if a pattern stood out of where common mistakes are (“Be cautious, Laplace’s Rule works a bit differently when there can be multiple outcomes”) and to get more datapoints that practice works. That’s not a knock against what Olli’s written here, that’s a wish for more people to follow up and do this! Without feedback on what techniques work and what it looks like to improve, building a martial art of rationality gets much harder. With feedback like this, other people can better understand what’s worth practicing and what’s realistic to expect.

  That’s the most important takeaway I had from this takeaway. The repeated practice worked, and Olli got more calibrated as they practiced.

  I’m inclined to think the Best Of LessWrong posts should include, not just the big insights or the shiny new techniques, but the dutiful reports years later about how those techniques have impacts on normal life. I’d like to lightly recommend Takeaways From Calibration Training for inclusion in the Best Of LessWrong Posts.