Ben Pace

• Ben Pace 19 May 2026 4:59 UTC

  18 points

  0

  on: My hobby: run­ning de­ranged surveys

  Curated (a term which here means “this was just emailed to 30,000+ people”). I love getting in contact with reality, and it’s great to become actually informed about what various populations’ views actually are. This post did it without killing me in stats and graphs, and also the dot-dot-dot space for predicting made it trivial for me to join in. Kudos for running all of these surveys, and thanks for the writeup!

• Ben Pace 18 May 2026 23:01 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  No, unfortunately not. Not sure what the option is here, my vague guess is that I’d just react to the first line.

• Ben Pace 18 May 2026 22:29 UTC

  15 points

  11

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  I think it would be good for people to use the “smells like LLM” react. If it’s right, then I’d very much like to know, and if it’s wrong, I’d like the culture to broadly learn more about what false-positives we’re seeing.

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #83 (Tues­day 5/​19)

• Ben Pace 13 May 2026 2:18 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  I do kind of think we should be applying the frontpage/​personal filter reliably to the quick takes section, so that it’s less news-y.

• Ben Pace 12 May 2026 21:33 UTC

  5 points

  1

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  I have also wanted for a way to curate comments, separate from posts.

  I think a good next step to get more in contact with this, would be for someone to write a “highlights from the comments” post for the last month. See how good they are, how many there are, how much context is needed, and whether it’s a good reading experience. I might curate it if it’s a good reading experience.

• Ben Pace 11 May 2026 20:53 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Please Be Se­ri­ous

  I don’t know why people feel comfortable telling people how to dress, who to talk to, or how to live, but it always feels authoritarian to me. (Strong downvote.)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #82 (Tues­day 5/​12)

• Ben Pace 11 May 2026 2:51 UTC

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  I think it could be good to build post-level replies, where, when you get to the comment section, the post-item (i.e. just the height of like 3 lines of a comment) is sorted in the comment section by the karma of the post. So that you don’t have to choose between writing a response in a comment or in a post, but can instead do both in one motion.

• Ben Pace 11 May 2026 2:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: sjadler’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  Yeah. My typical twitter interactions are either:

  1. Take the lowest leaf of a thread, then systematically go up the tweets, and expand all the ones with multiple children, and keep going until they’re all expanded, and then start to read down.

  2. Open the author’s twitter profile, view their replies, then click to open all their replies in new tabs so that I make sure to have all the subthreads

• Ben Pace 10 May 2026 23:49 UTC

  57 points

  50

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  It’s really helpful that posts have titles and can be googled, and are written to be read without reading a whole reply chain first. Tweets are far less well-designed for reading, can’t be googled, don’t have titles, and often require reading long threads of lots quote tweets of lots of different subcultures that you don’t understand.

• Ben Pace 8 May 2026 21:29 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Evil is bad, ac­tu­ally (Vas­sar and Olivia Schaefer)

  Most people visiting Lighthaven are attending a specific event (e.g. MATS, Progress Conference, Vitalist Bay, etc) and expect that the event runner has chosen the people there. There are some people who primarily know it for Lightcone events (e.g. LessOnline, Inkhaven) who might think it, there are some people who have never heard of LessWrong and are there for a specific event (e.g. wedding guests, various research conferences, etc) who would definitely not think it.

  It’s also importantly the case that I don’t respect either guilt-by-association nor trust-by-association as a way of relating to people and their relationships, and won’t avoid business relationships even if a bunch of people are foolishly assuming we do that kind of thing.

• Ben Pace 8 May 2026 19:12 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Evil is bad, ac­tu­ally (Vas­sar and Olivia Schaefer)

  It’s kind of like the opposite of guilt-by-association. Trust-by-association. Both are wrong.

• Ben Pace 7 May 2026 23:02 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  Hard disagree. 8% is wildly overinflated… The main utility of this prediction market is driving internet chatter on how useful prediction markets are.

  Polymarket has it at 10%. I don’t know where you’re located, but if you’re able to buy some NO, and the WHO doesn’t characterize Hantavirus as a pandemic this year, then you’ll make ~11% returns.

• Ben Pace 7 May 2026 22:57 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: jelly’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  Polymarket has it at 10%, with $1.6M traded, at the time of writing.

• Ben Pace 6 May 2026 23:11 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: gustaf’s comment on: Open Thread Win­ter 2025/​26

  Thanks! Quick feedback: the first three seem not-fun to me. The Yudkowsky Facts seems not-dialogue-enough. I’ll look more at the rest though. I like that the bear-fat-and-honey post is an Inkhaven post, and I can imagine something on stage playing with eating that very mixture. And there are a lot of comments to look through there.

• Ben Pace 6 May 2026 22:21 UTC

  16 points

  5

  in reply to: Philip Harker’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  It sounds to me like you’re expecting too much from all information. Consider the information that physical matter is made of atoms, which are about a nanometer across, and have positively charged protons and neutrons in the center, and then much smaller electrons whizzing around in orbits. This has been revolutionary for society, leading to so much ability to do engineering and chemistry and understanding cosmology and so forth.

  A typical teenager learning this information for the first time might ask “what utility will this give me personally?” and find it has little direct application. Yet I would not advise them that this information is not worth knowing.

  That’s the first point, that information doesn’t need to be directly connected to an outcome to be worth knowing.

  The second point is that fine gradations in information are valuable. I can imagine someone similarly saying “Why should it be valuable to anyone to know the difference between Apple Stock being $285 versus $275? Surely we should just care whether it’s doing well or not? Why don’t we just replace it with the words “Great” “Good” “Bad” “Worse”? Yet often small signs tell us something. A few percentage points of dip can imply that a new product release went poorly. A change in CEO leading to stock price raising a few points can indicate very good things about this new CEO.

  In this case, I find information like “8% chance of a pandemic” valuable in lots of ways.

  • It helps me to know how often we get 8% chance pandemics. I wish I could look back over the decades and see how often pandemics got to being this likely. This generally helps me understand our civilizational resilience and how much of an issue pandemics are.^[1]

  • It helps me to know how much to keep tracking it. If the prediction market gave it <1% then I would be like “Great, this is an update that I can stop thinking about it and stop tracking it.” At this range I expect we’re fine but I will still be on the lookout for more info.

  • I also like knowing the specific probabilities so I can learn which events have an important effect. For instance, it’s currently around 5%. There may be many news stories about this pandemic, and seeing which ones cause movement vs which ones don’t, will help me build a model of what information actually matters.

  Added: The third point is that public legibility is a massive value-add, and could well be most of the value. Given that it’s public, it makes me more confident that, if it were to get higher, people would notice and warn me. Much of the news landscape is just people arguing whether something is an emergency (which our memetics are perversely incentivized to say is true all of the time), so whether lots of people are acting alarmed just isn’t something most people can be very sensitive to changes in. The change from 5% to 50% is serious for me and yet I don’t know how to tell that difference from the tone of people on twitter or in many media outlets, especially when they are not themselves precise.

  1. ^

     To go into more detail on this, I had an LLM write the following so that the math checked out: you can imagine a world where every year carries a 5% pandemic risk, and another world where every 15 years carries a 75% pandemic risk. Over 60 years, both imply 3 expected pandemics, but they suggest very different prevention strategies: steady-state risk reduction in the first case, versus identifying and defusing rare high-risk transition periods in the second.

• Ben Pace 6 May 2026 21:59 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  I think all that “unlikely” means is “less than 50%”. I value knowing what different sources believe at more granularity than that.

• Ben Pace 6 May 2026 18:43 UTC

  16 points

  0

  on: Open Thread Win­ter 2025/​26

  Bounty: $150 for submitting comment sections that we use for our theatrical performance at LessOnline; $75 for good hits. You can reply in a comment here or DM me.

  Hello! I am organizing the Shakespearean Comment Section Re-enactment Society for LessOnline, after its success at the Inkhaven Fair.
  
  Essentially we adapt posts with active comment sections into performances, dressed in Shakespearian attire. Last time we adapted 7 posts & comment sections into a 30-minute performance; my guess is this time we’ll do a similar amount.
  
  I am looking for help finding good source material! If you submit to me a post-with-comment-section that we end up using, I will pay you $150. If it is a good hit that we edit and rehearse but eventually cut I will pay you $75. Note that we’re happy to do lots of cutting, don’t worry if the comments are too long.

  What are we looking for?

  • Comment sections with extended back-and-forths

  • Funny comment sections

  • Heated arguments

  • Someone changing their mind

  • Curious or intriguing comment sections (e.g. people telling surprising stories about themselves)

  As a positive example, this was the funniest post & comment section from last time: I went to America’s worst national parks so you don’t have to (120 comments)

  Negative examples would be highly informative comment sections with little debate or dialogue, and comment sections with little emotion in them. This is an example of one that wouldn’t work well: It Takes Two Paracetamol? (19 comments)

  P.S. Feel free to let me know if you would like to be one of the performers. Any performance talents are also welcome (e.g. jugglers, gymnasts, lutenists, etc).

• Ben Pace 5 May 2026 18:38 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Ir­re­triev­abil­ity; or, Mur­phy’s Curse of Oneshot­ness upon ASI

  I don’t particularly care if it’s a cartoon, a poem, a series of jokes, or written at 2am while drunk. Regardless of the format, if it contains valid arguments and valuable information, it’s welcome on LessWrong.