Ben Pace

Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes, June ’26

The Power to Punish

Im­pres­sions at the Ex­trem­ity of Civilization

Te­quila Sun­set at the Hog’s Head (A Scene)

• Ben Pace 13 Jun 2026 4:38 UTC

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Lighthaven East—A Fea­si­bil­ity Study

  I kinda vibe this. “Lighthaven East” is in Boston or NYC, is a more intellectual place. “Lighthaven DC” is a different beast with a very different focus (e.g. perhaps it works far harder to be politically neutral ground).

Park­in­son’s Heuris­tic: The Only Time To Do Anything

[CANCELED] Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #85.5 (Tues­day 6/​9)

• Ben Pace 5 Jun 2026 5:59 UTC

  7 points

  1

  in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform

  I’d want to see any statistic before I believed that. There weren’t that many writers even writing on LW during Inkhaven 2, and the ones that were (e.g. Lawrence Chan, Katha Grace, Oliver Habryka, etc) I think mostly wrote pretty good stuff.

• Ben Pace 4 Jun 2026 23:52 UTC

  2 points

  2

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

  I do really think there’s a lot of using-AI and a dearth of understanding-how-people-are-using-AI.

  I think using AI is often good, but I would like more understanding of what’s going on.

• Ben Pace 4 Jun 2026 21:01 UTC

  9 points

  5

  in reply to: Andrea_Miotti’s comment on: abramdem­ski’s Shortform

  You keep saying good things you’ve done as though it means you couldn’t possibly have also done the bad things you’re being accused of.

• Ben Pace 2 Jun 2026 4:45 UTC

  11 points

  2

  on: “Con­ta­gious Hum­ming” to Silence a Room

  Thanks for the writeup.

  I believe @Duncan Sabien (Inactive) is the person responsible for this being a widespread tool in our culture. (I use this at basically all events I run to gather the attention of a large group for a talk or announcement.)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #85 (Tues­day 6/​2)

• Ben Pace 30 May 2026 23:26 UTC

  5 points

  1

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Some Dat­ing Stories

  FWIW my current stance is that this content is good for the reasons you mention, but that I (and I suspect many others) would like slightly better ability to filter it out of our day-to-day site experience.

  My first idea is that standard NSFW content (i.e. explicitly sexual) should be able to be flagged by readers as such (not relying on the author to get it right). For posts it should let you know at the top of the post, either in the tags or beside the author name and date) and that NSFW comments should be click-to-view, like how Reddit does with many images.

  

  And of course, users like Wentworth should easily be able to hit a toggle in their user settings for “don’t blur NSFW content for me”.

• Ben Pace 30 May 2026 9:32 UTC

  16 points

  4

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Some Dat­ing Stories

  I was only 14 or 15 when it was happening and I don’t remember it in too much detail, but I’m surprised it completely passed you by.

  I am failing to find many top-level posts about it, mostly asides and then comment sections about it^[1], but in 2009 Eliezer wrote Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics. In it, he’s mostly making a point I believe is true and have thought of many times since, similar to “You Don’t Exist, Duncan”, that one of the key issues with gendered language is that it explicitly excludes the reader from it, in a way that the author and many readers don’t notice, but the excluded reader immediately does, and this is other-ing.

  Then relevantly, as something of an aside, he gives this account of “PUA”:

  And if someone decides that all discussion of the PUA (pickup artist) community, makes her feel excluded...?

  Er… I have to say… I sort of get that one. I too can feel the locker-room ambiance rising off it. Now, yes, we have a lot of men here who are operating in gender-imbalanced communities, and we have men here who are nerds; and if you’re the sort of person who reads Less Wrong, there is a certain conditional probability that you will be the sort of person who tries to find a detailed manual that solves your problems...

  ...while not being quite sane enough to actually notice you’re driving away the very gender you’re trying to seduce from our nascent rationalist community, and consequentially shut up about PUA...

  ...oh, never mind. Gender relations much resembles the rest of human existence, in that it largely consists of people walking around with shotguns shooting off their own feet. In the end, PUA is not something we need to be talking about here, and if it’s giving one entire gender the wrong vibes on this website, I say the hell with it.

  And if someone decides that it’s not enough that a comment has been downvoted to −5; it needs to be banned, or the user needs to be banned, in order to signify that this website is sufficiently friendly...?

  Sorry—downvoting to −5 should be enough to show that the community disapproves of this lone commenter.

  As he was the head moderator and founder of the site, I think this is probably as clear a sense of the cultural attitude at the time. And indeed, 4 years later when someone wrote a defense of PUA, it received −44 karma (but was not censored).

  (It also received 95 comments! This was back when LW was sorted by chronological order, so downvoted posts got the same intense attention as upvoted posts, and got as much discussion, which the current LW team would consider a poor allocation of users’ attention.)

  1. ^

     1. On this 2009 post on dating advice, it’s mentioned 40 times.

     2. Alicorn mentions it a little in her 2009 post Sayeth the Girl, and with the comments it’s mentioned 74 times.

     3. In 2011 Lukeprog talks here and mentioned he interviewed to be a contestant on a tv show titled “The Pick-Up Artist”, and the comments mention the string “PUA” 82 times.

     4. The 2013 post “LW Women: LW Online” has 596 comments (!) and PUA is mentioned 21 times.

• Ben Pace 27 May 2026 17:30 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: Bad Prob­lems Don’t Stop Be­ing Bad Be­cause Some­body’s Wrong About Fault Analysis

  Curated. Classic issue that comes up all the time, yet I’ve never seen it called out so clearly and well. Thanks for writing it!

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #84 (Tues­day 5/​26)

• Ben Pace 23 May 2026 1:55 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Xger31’s comment on: This is a Dat­ing Ad

  This user is banned. There was substantive feedback in Gordon’s top-level comment (that this dating post didn’t give much of a sense of you as a person), and also honestly described how it landed with him. In response, Xger31 didn’t engage with the former, said he didn’t agree with the latter, then insulted Gordon a bunch. This isn’t good discourse, and is far below the standard for first-time contributors to LessWrong, so I have removed his account’s permissions to submit content to the site.

• Ben Pace 23 May 2026 1:03 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The Owned Ones

  The Owners are weak-men in that they are not the strongest possible defenders of a slavery setup broadly similar to this. Nonetheless it good to get on the same page that this setup would be morally atrocious. That common ground is helpful for figuring out whether the real-life situation is.

• Ben Pace 20 May 2026 17:12 UTC

  12 points

  3

  in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: lc’s Shortform

  Well, I have called 911 several times, and they often are incompetent and do not want to show up. One or two times in the past a homeless person has snuck into my property, and one time the police arrived in 25 mins, and another time they arrived after 5 hours. One time I called them to say I had tracked down the thief of my laptop to a location where he was in the process of selling it to another criminal, and I had to demand three times that they show up, while they insisted it was a crime from another jurisdiction of Berkeley and should spend time linking it to that report (ultimately this delay cost me the laptop, though we still caught the thief).

  Inkhaven resident Jenn wrote about how the emergency services in Canada failed to show up after her Dad‘s heart attack, and so he died. There are many situations where I would call an uber rather than rely on 911 (though of course I would call both).

  Brian’s idealistic description of police sounds extreme too, to my ears.

• Ben Pace 19 May 2026 4:59 UTC

  27 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!