Ben Pace

Karma: 37,712

I’m an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.

I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
I believe it is good to take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
It is wrong to directly cause the end of the world. Even if you are fatalistic about what is going to happen.

Randomly: If you ever want to talk to me about anything you like for an hour, I am happy to be paid $1k for an hour of doing that.

(Longer bio.)

Ben Pace 7 Dec 2025 11:52 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Should you donate to Lightcone Infrastructure?
I think your read of Habryka’s reply is mistaking a for-all quantifier and a there-exists quantifier. Insofar as you’re saying “never use this information to harm the interests of the third party” Habryka is saying “no; here is an instance I would want to share it that seems reasonable to me that does involve something the third party might find harmful”. This is distinct from “no; if I ever find a situation where I can use this info to harm the third-party, I will use the info to do that”.

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #60 (Tuesday 12/9)

Garrett Baker, Aella, Ronny Fernandez and Ben Pace

6 Dec 2025 1:38 UTC

8 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

Ben Pace 4 Dec 2025 9:48 UTC
5 points
0
on: Believing In
Nominating this for the 2024 Review. +9. This post has influenced me possibly the most of any LessWrong post on 2024, and I think about it many times per month. Basically seems like there was a whole part of human psychology that I was not modeling before this when people talked about what they believed in, except as people failing to have beliefs as maps of the territory (as opposed to things-to-invest-in). It helped me notice that there were things in the world that I believed-in in this sense but had not been allowing myself to notice, and has been a major boost to my motivation to do things that I care about and find meaningful.

Ben Pace 3 Dec 2025 22:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform
Gotcha. To be clear I didn’t read you as requesting a change; this was written primarily for “all the readers” to have more contact with reality, than to challenge anything you wrote.

Ben Pace 3 Dec 2025 22:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform
I don’t know what you mean by “the prompt, in a significant sense, is the post”. When I ask ChatGPT “What are some historical examples of mediation ending major conflicts?” that is really very different information content than the detailed list of 10 examples it gives me back.

Ben Pace 3 Dec 2025 22:03 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform
I’m just gonna copy-paste my comment from yesterday’s discussion, so that people have concrete examples of what we’re dealing with here.
We are drowning in this stuff. If you want you can go through the dozen-a-day posts we get obviously written by AI, and proposed we (instead of spending 5-15 mins a day skimming and quickly rejecting them) spend as many hours as it takes to read and evaluate the content and the ideas to figure out which are bogus/slop/crackpot and which have any merit to them. Here’s 12 from the last 12 hours (that’s not all that we got, to be clear): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Interested in you taking a look.

Ben Pace 2 Dec 2025 21:08 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: NATO is dangerously unaware of its military vulnerability
We are drowning in this stuff. If you want you can go through the dozen-a-day posts we get obviously written by AI, and proposed we (instead of spending 5-15 mins a day skimming and quickly rejecting them) spend as many hours as it takes to read and evaluate the content and the ideas to figure out which are bogus/slop/crackpot and which have any merit to them. Here’s 12 from the last 12 hours (that’s not all that we got, to be clear): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Interested in you taking a look.
What links here?
- Ben Pace's comment on the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform by the gears to ascension (3 Dec 2025 22:03 UTC; 4 points)

Ben Pace 2 Dec 2025 4:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Ben’s 10 Tips for Event Feedback Forms
I have not seen a form website/software that allows for this. Interested to hear about one if anyone knows.

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #59 (Tuesday 12/2)

Garrett Baker, Aella, Ronny Fernandez, Ben Pace and Elijah Ravitz-Campbell

1 Dec 2025 20:37 UTC

8 points

0 comments2 min readLW link

A Statistical Analysis of Inkhaven

Ben Pace1 Dec 2025 7:47 UTC

31 points

0 comments8 min readLW link

Ben’s 10 Tips for Event Feedback Forms

Ben Pace30 Nov 2025 7:05 UTC

71 points

7 comments6 min readLW link

A Harried Meeting

Ben Pace29 Nov 2025 7:57 UTC

38 points

0 comments6 min readLW link

Ben Pace 29 Nov 2025 0:10 UTC
25 points
6
in reply to: zroe1’s comment on: zroe1′s Shortform
I’m happy to chip in $500 for a replication. $250 if it seems post-facto to be a good-faith attempt, and $250 if it indeed does not replicate (as determined by some third party, perhaps Greenblatt or kave rennedy). Feel free to his the plus react if you also would chip in this money, or comment with a different amount.

Should you work with evil people?

Ben Pace28 Nov 2025 7:56 UTC

36 points

7 comments5 min readLW link

Ben Pace 27 Nov 2025 20:18 UTC
8 points
0
on: Contra Collisteru: You Get About One Carthage
I don’t think this makes much sense. Here’s a series of assorted heckles, followed by me simply stating my stance here.
1. You’re constantly in situations where you need to provide political forces. Consider: your family is getting together and deciding when/where/how-long. There are many tradeoffs here. It helps for you to make pushes and pulls on this, and be for / against options. This is often much better than saying “y’all decide and I’ll just show up”.
2. Even in the extreme, there are many things worth destroying. The FDA. AI extinction companies. Mob justice. Death. Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX.
3. In this quote
  > White collar corporate America prizes the ability to work with anyone… Consider your political opinions… Expressing those opinions is discouraged. Why? Imagine a coworker said they were Against Your Team. Do you feel any reluctance to work with them? If you say you’re against Their Team, will they still want to work with you?
  You say that expressing your opinions necessarily leads to animosity. While this is sometimes true, sometimes it leads to respect! I understand that sometimes it is worth not discussing these things beceause you don’t respect the other person’s ability to set it aside; but also I think you’re forgetting that there are ways to connect to someone’s human side while expressing very disagreed-with opinions.
  I admit that it probably makes sense in a number of contexts to have a no-politics-discussion norm, but it is mostly a sign of dysfunction and low-skill amongst the people.
4. “You should oppose about one thing. Everywhere else, talk less, smile more.” ← I hope you did not take away from Hamilton that Burr is the guy to be emulated!
5. “It would not occur to me to write “____ is the ethics of evil” for basically any ____. I’d regard that as an unforced tactical error, and instead I aspire to try things like “I’m curious why people believe ____?”″ ← I put this slightly more in the ‘temperament’ category than the ‘tactics’ category.
My overall position: I think it’s a good heuristic to be able to work with anyone. But also I think it’s generally healthier to be able to take more political stands, and I think if you are in a position to then this is a good sign about your environment. I also think there’s a skill issue in being able to take political stands while still working with people who disagree with you on those.

Despair, Serenity, Song and Nobility in “Hollow Knight: Silksong”

Ben Pace27 Nov 2025 7:51 UTC

26 points

2 comments3 min readLW link

Reasons Why I Cannot Sleep

Ben Pace26 Nov 2025 3:37 UTC

57 points

7 comments2 min readLW link

Ben Pace 26 Nov 2025 3:25 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
Reminder that spoiler tags exist, like this:
I think this is better for hiding spoilers than the long dots… because when I saw this post in recent discussion, I saw all the dots and also some of the first paragraph after them.
You make spoiler tags by adding >! at the front of the para.

Ben Pace 26 Nov 2025 3:22 UTC
7 points
7
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Alignment will happen by default. What’s next?
Huh, I quite like the crystalized/fluid split in describing what the LLMs are good and bad at. I’m not sure if it’s an analogy or just a literal description.

Ben Pace 25 Nov 2025 20:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Why Not Just Train For Interpretability?
Aside: This is why subtweeting is bad. It makes people paranoid that people are subtweeting them when they aren’t.