Ben Pace(Ben)

• Ben Pace 13 Jul 2020 22:26 UTC

  8 points

  on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  Why has no­body no­ticed that the OpenAI logo is three in­ter­twined pa­per­clips? This is an alarm­ing up­date about who’s truly in charge...

• Ben Pace 13 Jul 2020 21:41 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: willbradshaw’s comment on: The New Front­page De­sign & Open­ing Tag Creation!

  I also think it’s sub­stan­tially less­ened cer­tain things that felt aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. That said I had per­ma­nently changed my habits to in­stead use our stag­ing server (less­es­t­wrong.com) be­cause for me the differ­ence in eye-strain was so dra­matic. I ex­pect we’ll find ways to build a strong aes­thetic with this theme, so I’m not too wor­ried about the lo­cal change on that di­men­sion be­ing fairly nega­tive.

• Ben Pace 12 Jul 2020 18:28 UTC

  4 points

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

  ...and let’s give it one thou­sand karma hooray!

• Ben Pace 12 Jul 2020 6:43 UTC

  18 points

  on: Lurk­ing More Be­fore Join­ing Com­plex Conversations

  This is tricky be­cause not let­ting some­one join your con­ver­sa­tion is of­ten seen as a sign that they’re un­wel­come/​you-don’t-like-them, and I wish this could change as an over­all ra­tio­nal­ist-cul­ture-norm speci­fi­cally so that it _wouldn’t_ send that sig­nal. In­stead it’s just un­der­stood that “hav­ing a high con­text con­ver­sa­tion” is an ac­tivity you can’t re­ally in­ter­rupt once it’s started.

  I want to ex­press a feel­ing I had read­ing this para­graph, though not nec­es­sar­ily be­cause I think we have a dis­agree­ment about the con­crete policy recom­men­da­tion. (You’re right, this norm seems good, and I’ve been ac­tively try­ing to fol­low it my­self at re­cent events.)

  My feel­ing, read­ing this para­graph, is that it’s mak­ing a naive mis­take of as­sum­ing that the rea­son a cer­tain be­havi­our sig­nals a cer­tain un­der­ly­ing fact about so­cial re­al­ity is just a mis­take and could just be changed.

  Whereas in ac­tu­al­ity, there’s a rea­son that this be­havi­our nor­mally has this sig­nal. There’s some­thing differ­ent in this com­mu­nity than in many/​most other com­mu­ni­ties, and I think for this post to change peo­ple’s feel­ings it would be bet­ter to name the true fact about other so­cial situ­a­tions that peo­ple are ac­cu­rately mod­el­ling, and then make a sim­ple ar­gu­ment about what’s differ­ent here.

• Ben Pace 9 Jul 2020 7:39 UTC

  LW: 2 AF: 1

  AF

  in reply to: rohinmshah’s comment on: AI Re­search Con­sid­er­a­tions for Hu­man Ex­is­ten­tial Safety (ARCHES)

  Thank you!

• Ben Pace 9 Jul 2020 4:03 UTC

  LW: 5 AF: 2

  AF

  on: AI Re­search Con­sid­er­a­tions for Hu­man Ex­is­ten­tial Safety (ARCHES)

  Wow, this is long, and seems pretty de­tailed and in­ter­est­ing. I’d love to see some­one write a se­lec­tion of key quotes or a sum­mary.

Sun­day July 12, 12:00 (PDT) — On­line talks — Scott Garrabrant, Alexflint, alexei, Stu­art_Armstrong

• Ben Pace 4 Jul 2020 17:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The silence is deaf­en­ing – Devon Zuegel

  My first thought for LW was “post au­thor plus any­one in the com­ments plus any­one over 1k karma” as the de­fault.

The silence is deaf­en­ing – Devon Zuegel

• Ben Pace 4 Jul 2020 0:47 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Site Redesign Feed­back Requested

  Cheers Liron. I ap­pre­ci­ate you say­ing that.

• Ben Pace 3 Jul 2020 18:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Pablo_Stafforini’s comment on: Does the Berkeley Ex­is­ten­tial Risk Ini­ti­a­tive (self-)iden­tify as an EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tion?

  Fair.

• Ben Pace 3 Jul 2020 6:10 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: [on­go­ing] Thoughts on Pro­por­tional vot­ing methods

  I have “pinged” it. I also added a note to the top that I feel will help peo­ple ori­ent, though you’re wel­come to edit it.

• Ben Pace 2 Jul 2020 21:49 UTC

  6 points

  on: Does the Berkeley Ex­is­ten­tial Risk Ini­ti­a­tive (self-)iden­tify as an EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tion?

  I can’t an­swer your ques­tion prop­erly, in part be­cause I am not BERI. I’ll just share some of my thoughts that seems rele­vant for this ques­tion:

  • I ex­pect ev­ery­thing BERI sup­ports and funds to always be jus­tified in terms of x-risk. It will try to sup­port all the parts of EA that are fo­cused on x-risk, and not the rest. For ex­am­ple, their grant to EA Swe­den is de­scribed as “Effec­tive Altru­ism Swe­den will sup­port Markus Stoor’s pro­ject to co­or­di­nate two fol­low-up lunch-to-lunch meet­ings in Swe­den for x-risk-fo­cused in­di­vi­d­u­als.”

  • I think it would be cor­rect to clas­sify it en­tirely as an x-risk org and not as an EA org. I don’t think it does any EA-style anal­y­sis of what it should work on that is not cap­tured un­der x-risk anal­y­sis, and I think that peo­ple work­ing to do things like, say, fight fac­tory farm­ing, should never ex­pect sup­port from BERI (via the di­rect work BERI does).

  • I think it will have in­di­rect effects on other EA work. For ex­am­ple BERI sup­ports FHI and this will give FHI a lot more free­dom to take ac­tions in the world, and FHI does some sup­port of other ar­eas of EA (e.g. Owen Cot­ton-Bar­ratt ad­vises the CEA, and prob­a­bly that trades off against his man­age­ment time on the RSP pro­gramme). I ex­pect BERI does not count this in their calcu­la­tions on whether to help out with some work, but I’m not con­fi­dent.

  I would call it an x-risk org and not an EA-al­igned org in its work, though I ex­pect its staff all care about EA more broadly.

• Ben Pace 2 Jul 2020 21:47 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Does the Berkeley Ex­is­ten­tial Risk Ini­ti­a­tive (self-)iden­tify as an EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tion?

  nods I think I un­der­stand your mo­ti­va­tion bet­ter. I’ll leave a differ­ent top-level an­swer.

• Ben Pace 2 Jul 2020 21:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Does the Berkeley Ex­is­ten­tial Risk Ini­ti­a­tive (self-)iden­tify as an EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tion?

  Par­don for be­ing so challeng­ing, you know I’m always happy to talk with you and an­swer your ques­tions Evan :) Am just a bit ir­ri­tated, and let that out here.

  I do think that “iden­tity” and “brand” mustn’t be­come de­cou­pled from what ac­tu­ally gets done—if you want to talk mean­ingfully about ‘EA’ and what’s true about it, it shouldn’t all be level ³⁄₄ simu­lacra.

  Iden­tity with­out sub­stance or ac­tion is mean­ingless, and sort of not some­thing you get to de­cide for your­self. If you de­cide to iden­tify as ‘an EA‘ this causes no changes in your ca­reer or your dona­tions, has the av­er­age EA dona­tions sud­denly gone down? Has EA ac­tu­ally grown? It’s good to be clear on the ob­ject level and whether the proxy ac­tu­ally mea­sures any­thing, and I’m not sure I should call that per­son and EA’ de­spite their speech acts to the con­trary.

  (Will go and read your longer com­ment now.)

• Ben Pace 2 Jul 2020 19:04 UTC

  10 points

  on: Does the Berkeley Ex­is­ten­tial Risk Ini­ti­a­tive (self-)iden­tify as an EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tion?

  Why do you care? Can’t this be cached out into what you can ac­tu­ally ex­pect of the org?

  • If I come to them with an x-risk pro­ject to sup­port via their uni­ver­sity help, will they se­ri­ously con­sider sup­port­ing it? Prob­a­bly yes.

  • If I come to them with a global poverty pro­ject to sup­port via their uni­ver­sity help, will they se­ri­ously con­sider sup­port­ing it? Prob­a­bly no.

  • Do their hires pri­mar­ily come from peo­ple who have fol­lowed places like the EA Fo­rum and at­tended EA Global con­fer­ences in past years and worked on other non-profit pro­jects with peo­ple who’ve done the same? I think so.

  • When they used to run their grants pro­gramme, did they fund non-x-risk things? Largely not. I mean, of the less ob­vi­ous ones, they funded LessWrong, and CFAR, and 80k, and REACH, and Lev­er­age, which are each vary­ing lev­els of in­di­rect, but I ex­pect funded them all out of the effects they thought they’d have on x-risk.

• Ben Pace 1 Jul 2020 7:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: Invit­ing Cu­rated Authors to Give 5-Min On­line Talks

  Each week we’ll make a LW post for the event. Will ap­pear in the re­cent posts and on the com­mu­nity page.

• Ben Pace 1 Jul 2020 5:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: Invit­ing Cu­rated Authors to Give 5-Min On­line Talks

  Ah, ex­cel­lent point. Yes. Up­dated the form.

Invit­ing Cu­rated Authors to Give 5-Min On­line Talks

• Ben Pace 30 Jun 2020 19:06 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: What was your rea­son­ing for de­cid­ing whether to raise chil­dren?

  Yeah, agree on the men/​women differ­ences.

  Be­ing in a house with kids also sounds like some­thing that would bring some of the benefits. I guess peo­ple in close knit com­mu­ni­ties used to have more availa­bil­ity for this—you could go help out at the nearby school, for ex­am­ple. My Dad lives in a pretty healthy com­mu­nity in The Nether­lands, and for many years ran a weekly Chess club for the kids there, which had like 30-40 kids come ev­ery week. He works in the Chess in­dus­try and would help the strongest kids go to tour­na­ments and more.

  I no­tice there are sev­eral al­ter­na­tives here that sound like things I’d find mean­ingful that don’t in­volve hav­ing kids my­self. I think I’ll think more on them...