Screwtape

• ScrewtapeFeb 6, 2025, 3:45 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

  You are correct, that should be fixed. That’s a straightforward mistake on my part, thank you for pointing it out!

• ScrewtapeFeb 6, 2025, 6:00 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

  (In case that came across as sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate your stating the position clearly and think lots of other people probably hold that position. I’m being a little silly with paraphrasing a meme, but I mean it in a friendly kind of silly way.)

• ScrewtapeFeb 6, 2025, 5:57 AM

  11 points

  1

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

  Your preferences are reasonable preferences, and also I disagree with them and plan to push the weird fanfiction and cognitive self-improvement angles on LessWrong. May I offer you a nice AlignmentForum in this trying time?

Chi­canery: No

• ScrewtapeFeb 6, 2025, 4:55 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

  Yeah, I don’t know how typical that frontpage full of AI is, I just checked as I was writing the review. It seems like if you don’t de-emphasize AI content at this point though, it’s easy for AI to overwhelm everything else.

  One idea if you want like, a minimal change (as opposed to a more radical archipelago approach) is to penalize each extra post of the same tag on the frontpage? I don’t know how complicated that would be under the hood. I’d be happy to see the one or two hottest AI posts, I just don’t want to see 3/​4ths AI and have to search for the other posts.

  To be clear, I think there’s a bunch of AI posts on the front page because that’s what’s getting upvoted, and also if LessWrong does want to show mostly AI posts then especially given the state of the world that’s a reasonable priority. It’s not what I usually write or usually read, but LessWrong doesn’t have to be set up for me- I’m just going to keep reviewing it from my perspective.

• ScrewtapeFeb 6, 2025, 4:45 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

  I will cheerfully bet at 1:1 odds that half the people who show up on LessWrong do not know how to filter posts on the frontpage. Last time I asked that on a survey it was close to 50% and I’m pretty sure selection effects for who takes the LW Census pushed that number up.

Re­view­ing LessWrong: Screw­tape’s Ba­sic Answer

In­for­ma­tion Ver­sus Action

• ScrewtapeFeb 3, 2025, 10:57 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

  Yep, in what’s possibly an excess of charity/​politeness I sure was glossing “exploiting loopholes and don’t want their valuable loopholes removed” as one example of where someone was having an unusual benefit.

• ScrewtapeFeb 3, 2025, 10:54 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

  I guess other forums don’t literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/​advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.

  I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There’s a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads

  Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of “I’ve been banned from other places, hence this attitude” and “in practice [other forums] mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/​advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly” implies you either refuse to follow rules/​advice or that you insult others repeatedly. Obviously you said most cases, not all cases.

  In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.

  Well, yes, and I’ve never heard of a coach saying someone wasn’t allowed to play basketball anywhere. At least where I live, there’s a public court about a ten minute bike ride away and basketballs are cheap. If, say, I’m a student on a college basketball team whose coach asked me to stop doing layups during his practices, I can even use the exact same court later when the team isn’t practicing. The equivalent for LessWrong is, I believe, saying you’re welcome to continue communicating on the internet but that it will happen on some other forum.

  Your average basketball coach doesn’t only remove people with bad faith, they also bench people or cut them from the team for not being good at basketball. That’s quite common.

• ScrewtapeFeb 3, 2025, 6:55 PM

  2 points

  3

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

  Mhm, I do think that sometimes happens and I wish more of those places would say “The rule is the moderator shall do whatever they think reasonable.” That’s basically my moderation rule for like, my dinner parties, or the ~30 person discord I mostly use to advertise D&D games.

  But uh, I also suspect “The moderators shall do whatever they want” (and the insinuation that the moderators are capricious and tyrannical) is a common criticism leveled when clearness is sacrificed and the user disagrees with a moderation call.

  Imagine a forum with two rules. “1. Don’t say false things, 2. don’t be a jerk.” It would not surprise me at all to hear Bob the user saying that he was being perfectly reasonable and accurate, the other user Carla was lying and being a jerk, and the mod just did whatever they wanted and banned Bob. Maybe the rule was secretly “The moderators shall do whatever they want.” But maybe the rule wasn’t clear, the moderator made a judgement call, and the correct tradeoff is happening. It’s really, really hard to legislate clear rules against being a jerk. Even the ‘false things’ line has a surprising amount of edge cases!

• ScrewtapeFeb 3, 2025, 6:42 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

  Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor’s taste. The same is true for scientific publications.

  I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.

  I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says

  LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that’s uncommon for web forums^[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we’re about.

  My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn’t the place for you, this guide will help you have a good “visit” or simply seek other pastures.

  On the margin, is there room for improvement? Seems likely, but doesn’t seem bad. If I was in charge I’d be tempted to open the New Users Guide with like, four bullet points that said ‘This place is for aspiring rationalists, don’t say false things, don’t be a jerk, for examples of what we mean by that read on.’ That’s somewhat stylistic though.

  There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn’t sufficient

  Wait, now I’m confused. Most forums I’m aware of don’t have much of a Good Faith defense. I looked up the rules for the first one I thought of, Giant In The Playground, and while it’s leaning a bit more Comprehensive and Clear I don’t see a place where it says if you break a rule in good faith you’re fine.

  In general, someone trying to contribute to a thing who but doing so badly doesn’t get that much of a pass? Like, I’ve been politely ejected from a singing group before because I was badly off-key. Nobody doubted I was trying to sing well! It doesn’t change the fact that the group wanted to have everyone singing the right notes.

  I suggest that instead of making rate-limited users (who used up their rate) unable to comment at all, their additional comments should be invisible, but still visible to other rate-limited users (and users who choose to see them).

  Meh. The internet is big. If the kind of thing that got someone rate-limited on LessWrong got them rate-limited or banned everywhere else, I’d be supportive of having somewhere they were allowed to post. Reddit’s right over there, you know?

  I think giving special emphasis to rate-limited users for rate-limited users is straightforwardly a bad idea. If someone got rate-limited, in general I assume it’s because they were writing in ways the mods and/​or other users thought they shouldn’t do. If someone is going to stick around, I want their attention on people doing well, not doing badly. Imagine a basketball practice; if I’m a lousy shot, the coach might tell me to sit out the drill and watch a couple of the good players for few minutes. If I’m really bad, I get cut from the team. No coach is going to say, “hey, you’re a lousy shot, so pay special attention to these other players who are just as bad as you.”

  A big component of this is I tend to think of LessWrong as a place I go to get better at a kind of mental skill, hence analogies to choir or basketball practice. You may have other goals here.

• ScrewtapeFeb 3, 2025, 5:44 PM

  4 points

  4

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

  Yeah, it’s easy to not be on the pareto frontier. Sometimes you can just make things better, and most people aren’t going to argue much against doing that. They might argue a little, because change is a cost. A few people will argue a lot, because they have some unusual benefit. If lots of people argue a lot, that suggests a tradeoff is happening.

  My observation is that some people do not prioritize one of the three corners of this triangle, and are confused when others argue about tradeoffs they don’t see as important.

Pick two: con­cise, com­pre­hen­sive, or clear rules

• ScrewtapeFeb 2, 2025, 5:59 AM

  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.

• ScrewtapeFeb 2, 2025, 5:39 AM

  6 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

• ScrewtapeJan 29, 2025, 6:01 PM

  2 points

  0

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

  I laughed, thank you for the excellent example.

• ScrewtapeJan 29, 2025, 5:58 PM

  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