Opinion

Introducing The Screwtape Ladders

​The time has come for me to find a new home for my writings. Like many an author before me, I’ve enjoyed improving my craft and getting feedback on my essays here. LessWrong is a good incubator for honing one’s skills in that arena. There’s a chance to get your point out in front of a really broad audience of really smart people. There’s been some cool moments. My oldest visible post, Write A Thousand Roads to Rome, got cited in a discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky once. I keep seeing people bring up Loudly Give Up, Don’t Quietly Fade as a motivator for speaking out. Sometimes it’s really cool people working on awesome projects, and I feel a flash of sadness at ‘aww, it’s not going to happen’ and also a bit of cool ‘whoa, they remember that post?’ You’ve all also let me get away with a lot of complaining. Sometimes I hope it’s been helpful complaining, like The Lizardman and the Black Cat Bobcat. Sometimes I don’t have much hope, like Everyone has a plan until they get lied to the face. That one was mostly just me venting. Those of you who live in Berkeley have had some extra complaints just for you.I won’t say it’s all been great. Sometimes the disagreement is mostly just confused nitpicking. Sometimes the moderators and you have different ideas on what’s worth showing to a frontpage audience. Mostly it’s a slow accumulation of UI changes as the commenters and posters you were used to rotate out for greener pastures. And that’s when the site isn’t buggy, eating a post you spent days on because you used the collapsible sections the UI offers. The long term incentive structure is the largest problem I’ve had. Karma and upvotes have a warping effect on what gets seen and who gets respected, a problem compounded by how unwilling people often are to downvote poor behavior. For all the criticism you sometimes get as a writer here, the rewards feel like they aren’t worth it. Substack offers money, x.com offers reach, and even a self-hosted situation would allow for more freedom than LessWrong offers. (Though Ronny’s UI changes recently have been a nice step in the right direction, albeit too little and too late.)LessWrong isn’t where I started out. For a few years I was on typepad, back when that site existed. I’ve had my own blog before but found maintaining it to be a bit more technical effort than I felt like at the time, and I considered using LLMs to take some of that effort off. Ultimately, it made more sense for me to go with a place with a proven track record of reliability.That’s why I’ve finally decided to make the move to a better website. If you want to keep up with my writings, you can find me at The Screwtape Ladders on tumblr.com. Hopefully this will be a slightly more stable place for my writing to live, and one with a bit more of a professional reputation.Discuss ​Read More

​The time has come for me to find a new home for my writings. Like many an author before me, I’ve enjoyed improving my craft and getting feedback on my essays here. LessWrong is a good incubator for honing one’s skills in that arena. There’s a chance to get your point out in front of a really broad audience of really smart people. There’s been some cool moments. My oldest visible post, Write A Thousand Roads to Rome, got cited in a discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky once. I keep seeing people bring up Loudly Give Up, Don’t Quietly Fade as a motivator for speaking out. Sometimes it’s really cool people working on awesome projects, and I feel a flash of sadness at ‘aww, it’s not going to happen’ and also a bit of cool ‘whoa, they remember that post?’ You’ve all also let me get away with a lot of complaining. Sometimes I hope it’s been helpful complaining, like The Lizardman and the Black Cat Bobcat. Sometimes I don’t have much hope, like Everyone has a plan until they get lied to the face. That one was mostly just me venting. Those of you who live in Berkeley have had some extra complaints just for you.I won’t say it’s all been great. Sometimes the disagreement is mostly just confused nitpicking. Sometimes the moderators and you have different ideas on what’s worth showing to a frontpage audience. Mostly it’s a slow accumulation of UI changes as the commenters and posters you were used to rotate out for greener pastures. And that’s when the site isn’t buggy, eating a post you spent days on because you used the collapsible sections the UI offers. The long term incentive structure is the largest problem I’ve had. Karma and upvotes have a warping effect on what gets seen and who gets respected, a problem compounded by how unwilling people often are to downvote poor behavior. For all the criticism you sometimes get as a writer here, the rewards feel like they aren’t worth it. Substack offers money, x.com offers reach, and even a self-hosted situation would allow for more freedom than LessWrong offers. (Though Ronny’s UI changes recently have been a nice step in the right direction, albeit too little and too late.)LessWrong isn’t where I started out. For a few years I was on typepad, back when that site existed. I’ve had my own blog before but found maintaining it to be a bit more technical effort than I felt like at the time, and I considered using LLMs to take some of that effort off. Ultimately, it made more sense for me to go with a place with a proven track record of reliability.That’s why I’ve finally decided to make the move to a better website. If you want to keep up with my writings, you can find me at The Screwtape Ladders on tumblr.com. Hopefully this will be a slightly more stable place for my writing to live, and one with a bit more of a professional reputation.Discuss ​Read More

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