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.