Screwtape

Karma: 5,698

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.

Screwtape May 12, 2025, 8:52 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
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 these problems is in helping local ACX meetup organizers. Some of them first found the blog a few months ago, ran a decent ACX Everywhere that blossomed into a regular meetup group, and then a conflict happened. I want good advice or structures to hand to them, and expecting them to be able to evaluate my advice to that standard seems unreasonable. It’s likely that at least one and possibly all of the local belligerents will have suggestions, and those suggestions will conveniently favour the advice-giver.
One way to read this essay, which I would endorse as useful, is as one useful answer to the question “why do all the people in this conflict I find myself in all have such different ideas of the procedure we should use to resolve it?”

Screwtape May 12, 2025, 8:37 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
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 referencing them is the parenthesis in section III about how the position of overseeing the resolution process is a position of interest for a bad actor, therefore you might even try random lot.
There is a mistake I’m trying to warn about where someone thinks conflict handling should be simple, why don’t we all sit down and come up with a simple setup, and I do not think they are actually envisioning how any part of this will work in the face of someone with a mind to get away with something. There is a second mistake I’m trying to warn about where someone makes confident assertions about how conflict handling should work, and people do not notice the ulterior motive. I recognize the weirdness around me trying to point out the second mistake—as I said in the post, “Okay, but why should you trust me? Professional interest since complaint handling is part of my role, but good question and don’t be satisfied by that.” I am trying design a setup that would work even if I was a problem even as I was designing the setup.
I do not think the logic you’re talking about is the logic I’m using. I will very cheerfully bet you my hundred bucks against your dollar that every police force does not criminalize everyone who makes any move towards trying to change the system, unless you’re using some non-standard definitions of police force and criminalize. I’m going to assume that “every” is colloquial, not literal, and that paragraph is rhetoric, but even if the section in quotes was how police forces and authoritarian enforcement organizations were, I don’t think their logic ends by suggesting constant vigilance against themselves.
That “professionals” are much more likely than anyone else to be bad actors is another fact that drastically undermines the OP’s thesis—and this blind spot is not an accident.
1. That would undermine my thesis if my thesis was that everyone should just trust the professionals, which seems to be the thing you claim is my thesis. That’s not my thesis, and bad actors turning out to be more likely “professionals”^[1] than any other category would not undermine my actual thesis.
2. I am not sure whether “this blind spot is not an accident” is suggesting that I’m making a good faith effort but a predictable mistake, or that I am deliberately leaving information which I know to be true and relevant out in an effort to make my argument stronger, or some third thing. Would you please clarify this? As you might imagine, if it’s the second I’m going to say that’s not what I’m trying to do.
1. ^
  I do think it would help to have a better name for this bucket, since in my contexts a lot of people aren’t getting paid a regular paycheck to do this and don’t have a lot of training or background. The obvious and central examples are- divorce lawyers are, CEA’s community health team comes to mind as well- but a lot of the time it’s a local meetup organizer in some random town that’s had an issue.

Screwtape May 10, 2025, 5:53 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
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 not the KGB at all.)
I’m not sure how literally to take the “unproblematically” adverb here. If you’re being literal, then I disagree; part of my thesis here is that sometimes there will be as many problems as enemy action can cause, and they will be able to cause some problems.
(If you’re on the lookout for a fully general counterargument, here’s one I haven’t found a way around! This theory treats occasional strident complaints about the way a resolution system is operating as very little evidence that the system is operating badly, because one would expect occasional bad actors to try shaking everyone’s trust in the system even if it was a good system. And yes, that is such a suspicious theory for me in particular to put forward. Dunno what to tell you here.)

Screwtape May 10, 2025, 5:34 AM
8 points
4
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
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 community, and I asked them instead of them unprompted (or as part of an argument) starting to tell me how it should work. Put another way, getting outside perspectives is helpful- if a romantic partner seems like they might be pressuring you, describe it to a friend and see what they say.
It’s part of why I spent a while studying other communities, looking to see if there was anything that say, Toastmasters and the U.S. Marines and Burning Man and Worldcon all agreed about.

Screwtape May 10, 2025, 5:15 AM
7 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent
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 protects itself: if someone suggests to you that this whole perspective is misguided and harmful, well, aren’t they just maliciously trying to undermine your vigilance?
I have a couple of thoughts here. One is that I don’t think this is true for most values of [whatever]. If someone has suggestions about the venue, or the meetup activities, or announcement platforms, I don’t think this dynamic is in play. If I get advice on job searching or algebra homework or the best way to bake a loaf of sourdough, I’m not getting nearly as much adverse selection as for conflict resolution from within the community I’m involved in. Who has a motive to subtly sabotage my sourdough?
If someone read this essay and came away with a full general counterargument against listening to advice on any subject, my guess is there’s a big reading comprehension failure happening.
It isn’t as clearly a failure of reading comprehension if someone comes away with the idea that they shouldn’t listen to any advice on handling conflict specifically, though I think that would also be incorrect. Finding people who are trustworthy, good at handling it well, and willing to teach you is wonderful. I’ve been trying to learn the most from sources well outside the rationalist community, but I think there is good advice to be had. Just, not uncritically trusted?
Also, some people seem to think this class of problem should be easy. For those people I want to make the point that it is (at least sometimes) an adversarial situation.

Screwtape May 10, 2025, 4:45 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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, I generally nod and say yep I endorse the local organizer being able to do that.^[1] Locals don’t get to ban people from other cities but they usually don’t need to.
I often do talk to people. I travel where I can^[2], but I also talk by videocall to lots of people in the ACX community to expand the range. Written complaints in a feedback form that I have permission to share do make for a lovely essay example, and they do come up, but videocall talks and in-person conversations feed into this. I take notes on many of both largely as my own memory aid, usually on paper in a stack of index cards. But every piece of information is evidence, so I’ll start with (uncertain, with wide error bars) intuitions on one or two sentence entries in an application form and build from there.
Bloodlessness is somewhere between a target and a necessary side effect of the way I’m discussing and dissecting the components of handling conflict here and in a lot of posts I’ve made on the subject lately. I could write the bloody versions, but I feel those drafts show too much fury to be generally useful to others.
1. ^
  I have to my memory overruled the local organizer exactly once, and in hindsight I think that was a mistake; not because I later came to agree with the local organizer (though I eventually more or less did) but because I think that’s an important power to have in the hands of the person actually doing the ground level work.
2. ^
  Mostly not to investigate complaints, though I’ve had that as one of multiple goals once or twice.

Screwtape Apr 28, 2025, 4:19 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: purple fire’s comment on: Kodo and Din
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 were maybe a hundred people who’d heard the lecture.)
A concept can still be useful in my own head even if the people I talk to don’t have that concept. Affordance, update, modularity (especially in code), these are all ideas I don’t talk about directly except with specialists but I have in my thoughts when it’s relevant. And one way to get other people to have a concept is to give a talk on it, or to write an essay about it on LessWrong.
Take modularity in particular: at some point in a good Intro To Programming class someone should explain the idea of modular code and why you should try to make your functions neat and compartmentalized, once in a while when talking to another programmer one of you might say ‘oh, I want to refactor this to be more modular’, but when you’re talking to your non-technical boss or client you probably don’t want to use that word. Is modularity a basic idea? Maaaybe? Depends on your frame of reference I guess. Does it serve a purpose other than in-group signaling? Yes! A programmer who doesn’t have the concept will write “worse”^[1] code.
That doesn’t make a convincing argument that this idea in particular is worth a jargon slot, but taking ideas and assigning specific words to them is useful.
1. ^
  Yes I’m asserting a broad and fuzzy quality of better or worse to code, I’m confident a jury of a dozen software engineers would back me up here.

Screwtape Apr 28, 2025, 2:54 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: purple fire’s comment on: Kodo and Din
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 concept is useful. Kodo is closer to signal if you just think of it in the sense used by The Signal and the Noise, though there’s at least a bit of distinction in my head. There are weaker and stronger signals, which make you more or less confident in (say) which candidate might win based on the poll. As contrast, a poll that was good kodo might tell you either the conservative party is going to win in a landslide or your poll sucks. “Polls say the conservative party is 60% to win” is a signal, but it isn’t kodo.
Noise and din seem more like synonyms, though both are kind of defined by being opposites. Noise is everything not signal, din is everything not kodo? I kinda wish din didn’t sound like an English word but figured it made more sense to write it up as it was in the lecture.

Screwtape Apr 16, 2025, 9:08 PM
6 points
0
on: Kamelo: A Rule-Based Constructed Language for Universal, Logical Communication
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 the idea of a tree structure that gets more specific as you go. Five phonemes seems too few though- I like what you’re doing with the consonant/vowel setup, but extra options seem very useful for compactness and there’s more options.
- Related- do you mind doing the IPA for the phonemes? I’m curious whether for instance “ti” is pronounced like “tired” (tɑɪəd) or like “tin” (tɪn) or “me” is pronounced like “meet” (mit) or “met” (mɛt)
- How do pronouns work?
It’s reasonable not to have answers for these yet, I don’t know what stage of conlang creation you’re on.

Screwtape Apr 15, 2025, 2:51 AM
10 points
4
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Bell Curve of Bad Behavior
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 needs unexpectedly expensive repairs, and an anonymous donor covers them.
- A new player on the sports team could honestly take credit for a win, but doesn’t want to make enemies and emphasizes other people’s work.
- A world class scientist gets asked what they do for work, and answers “I work for a university.”
- That one person who reached out after a bad breakup and talked their friend through the worst few nights.
Some off-kilter weirdos do invent middle-of-the-distribution actions, trying to create a false consensus or just badly misunderstanding what’s normal.
- “I have lots of friends here, ask Robin or Sean or Ted, they’ll vouch for me!” “We asked them. We had to remind them who you were, they said they talked to you once or twice briefly.”
- “I’m surprised to hear you say people are uncomfortable with me, they’ve never said so and I’m respectful of boundaries. Susan and I broke up, that’s all.” “According to Susan she politely said she’d rather you to leave her alone repeatedly, then eventually told you if you showed up at her dorm unannounced again she’d call the police, and she hasn’t heard from you since.” “Yeah, and? She set a boundary, I respected it. And that’s not her saying she’s uncomfortable is it?”
- “Alcohol? Eh, like I said I drink a normal amount, you know?” “This is the third time we’ve found you passed out on the lawn.” “Yeah, doesn’t everyone drink about that much? I’m not a real alcoholic, it’s not like I do that unless it’s the weekend.”
(Also, people contain multitudes. The same person can donate generously to their local community, talk their friends through the long nights of despair, and also drink themselves insensate every week plus ignore a lot of romantic soft nos.)
And, yeah, sometimes there’s just a very different outlook that’s causing some blue and orange ~~morality~~ social norms. Ideally, you can talk to the person or get used to them and build up a custom bell curve for them, notice that while weird their behavior isn’t actually hurting anyone, and everything’s fine. You can even be a bit of an ambassador or on-ramp. “Oh yeah, that’s Wanda, the Groucho Marx mustache is a bit weird but she’s pretty friendly.” I’m a big fan of spaces for the weird but harmless!

Screwtape Apr 14, 2025, 3:19 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Severin T. Seehrich’s comment on: Why does LW not put much more focus on AI governance and outreach?
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 for in-group signaling seems accurate but maybe overly cynical or something? I think it’s that having lots of posts on LessWrong is not a constructive part of their plan. Look at Situational Awareness and ai-2027: great writing, great outreach, obviously applicable to governance. Would either of those have been better as LessWrong posts? I think no, they’re more impactful as freestanding websites with a short url and a convenient PDF button.
What’s the actual game plan, and what intervening steps benefit from the average LessWrong reader knowing the information you want to tell them or having a calling card that leads the right LessWrong readers to reach out to you? Look at the rash of posting around SB-1047, particularly the PauseAI leader’s post. There’s a game plan that benefited from a bunch of LessWrong readers knowing some extra information.

Screwtape Apr 14, 2025, 2:54 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Katalina Hernandez’s comment on: Why does LW not put much more focus on AI governance and outreach?
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 closer to keeping up with incoming news and less building resource posts for the long term.
If I type “lawyer AI safety” into LessWrong’s search, your post comes up, which I assume is something you want.

Screwtape Apr 14, 2025, 1:26 PM
6 points
0
on: Why does LW not put much more focus on AI governance and outreach?
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 LessWrong users don’t make their own posts, just comment or lurk. Yes, they could do more, but I could say that of Twitter users too.
Is the question “why does the formal organization behind this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?” They just helped put out ai-2027.com. They run Alignment Forum. They host conferences like The Curve. Yes, they could do more, but at some point you look at the employee hours they have and what projects they’ve done and it balances out.
Is the question “why do the most prominent users on this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?” By karma, the top ten users are Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gwern, Raemon, John Wentworth, Kaj Sotala, Zvi, Scott Alexander, Wedrifrid, Habryka, and Vaniver. I think Eliezer, Scott, and Zvi do lots of outreach actually, and it’s not like John and Vaniver do none. Yes, they could do more Governance and outreach, but- no, wait, I take it back, I don’t think Zvi realistically has much more marginal AI outreach he can do, let the man rest I think his keyboard is smoking from all that typing, his children miss him while he’s away in the posting mines.
I’m not exactly a disinterested observer here. I do a lot of rationality outreach, and I make a deliberate choice not to push an AI angle because I think that would be worse both for AI and for my sub-branch of the rationality community. If your argument is more people on the margin should do AI governance and outreach, especially if they have comparative advantage, sure, I’ll agree with that. If you think the front page of LessWrong should be completely full of AI discussion, I disagree, with the core of my disagreement stemming from The Common Interest of Many Causes.

Screwtape Apr 11, 2025, 4:30 PM
3 points
0
on: Paper
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!

Screwtape Apr 8, 2025, 6:06 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Herbert_W’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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 unusual selection effects around what I see.
I do have one minor nitpick:
I think that’s a reasonable nitpick and I’ve updated it to be a bit clearer, thanks for the pointer!

Screwtape Apr 8, 2025, 5:53 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Steve M’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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.

Screwtape Apr 7, 2025, 6:12 PM
11 points
4
in reply to: LVSN’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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. Is that close?
Downvote as you will. But I’m trying to talk about a pattern I’ve noticed across multiple people, and I’m trying to share a tool because I can’t be in every ACX meetup in the world. I want local organizers to be able to notice this faster.
Also, speaking directly to the person I have a criticism about isn’t always enough. Imagine Bob is at a meetup and is nice to nine other attendees, but punches the tenth in the face in a way only me and the victim can see. The victim leaves, never to return, and I tell Bob not to do that again. Next week, there’s Bob, the nine from last time, and a newcomer. Bob punches the newcomer in the face where only me and the newcomer can see, the newcomer leaves, and I ban Bob. This is the situation I’m talking about in part IV but more-so because I saw the punching myself, and I’m still going to have to explain to the nine regulars why I banned someone who was only ever nice to them.
(I believe targeting dynamics do happen sometimes—see part V where I at least touch on this - but I also think the basic pattern of “nice to most people but terrible to a few” does happen sometimes.)

Screwtape Apr 7, 2025, 5:53 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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 get to meet the organizers in a way where I’d notice an “I Eat Puppies” tattoo on their face.
Weirder things can happen, and also you have less bandwidth to notice it.
Edit: There’s an essay that’s shaped some of my thinking here called Default Blind. I recommend it.

Screwtape Apr 7, 2025, 5:40 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
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 bunch of fake or exaggerated accusations about Erin.” I do think the latter happens sometimes though.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat. How much depends on things like how outlandish the actual accusation is and how coordinated the reviews look.
I strongly agree that adversarial optimization exists and is an important factor in these kinds of social situations. I’ve been thinking about and writing about social conflict a lot lately in large part because the sometimes adversarial nature of it makes this harder in many ways than most parts of running good meetups. Many (most?) problems you can fix and they stay fixed, and if you’re stuck you can ask the people around you. That doesn’t work as well for social conflict.

Screwtape Mar 26, 2025, 8:25 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Socially Graceful Degradation
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.