Ben Pace

• Ben Pace 18 Dec 2025 23:56 UTC

  6 points

  2

  on: Eliezer’s Un­teach­able Meth­ods of Sanity

  Curated. It helps to read accounts of how other people aren’t wrecked by the current state of the world, especially someone who has a good model of their mental world and who has been dealing with this longer than most people. And there’s lots of interesting things here, about being genre-savvy, the asides on predictions vs plans, and the Irori motto and image (which I love).

• Ben Pace 18 Dec 2025 2:32 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  I agree, but I’m too busy atm to code it, so I thought this quick take was worth it anyway.

• Ben Pace 18 Dec 2025 2:14 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  Please include a vote in your annual review comments! Often there are comments with mixed takes, or short comments with positive takes, but I don’t know how it shapes up. Is this strong positive only a +4? Is this weakly positive actually a +9? Is this highly mixed review a −1 or a +9? It helps to know for many reasons (for example, does this person think I should be giving a different vote to my current one?).

  This isn’t literally always the right call, but I think it should probably be considered the default.

• Ben Pace 17 Dec 2025 23:16 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Scis­sors State­ments for Pres­i­dent?

  +4. This has helped extend my thinking on the toxoplasma of rage, to understanding what causes people to talk about things a lot.

• Ben Pace 17 Dec 2025 23:08 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Act­ing Wholesomely

  +4. Since reading this I have oriented a bit more toward being wholesome and not cut off parts of me or my mind or my relationships to others in unhealthy ways. My comment on the post from when it was published is a good pointer to the kind of thinking I’ve been doing more of.

  I think this is useful as a meditation on a theme more than a successful articulation (I agree with Habryka’s curation notice saying that “it’s in some important respects failing at the kind of standard that I normally hold LessWrong posts to”). I wish there was a better post than it, but there isn’t, so I’m voting for it.

• Ben Pace 17 Dec 2025 22:30 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: So­cial sta­tus part 1/​2: ne­go­ti­a­tions over ob­ject-level preferences

  +4. I just got around to reading this post that I had heard was very good but also a slog. Well, it wasn’t much of a slog after all (apparently it’s been edited), and it was indeed quite interesting.

  I was commenting on another post to a colleague, and I said “It made all the wrong choices, but it did paint a whole picture”. I was saying there’s a virtue in trying to actually answer ambitious questions. Similarly, here for instance, I don’t think I’m sold on the lead/​follow as being a stand-in for big/​small, or its relationship to dominance/​prestige, but it did feel like it was explaining some parts of the world. The parts on culture clashes also felt like gears I will be keeping in mind when meeting other cultures.

  Also the diagrams were all great & helpful.

  Overall I am pretty confident that this is in the top 50 posts of the year, and I will move my vote to a +9 if I feel concerned that it isn’t being given enough attention.

• Ben Pace 17 Dec 2025 7:29 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: On the Con­trary, Steel­man­ning Is Nor­mal; ITT-Pass­ing Is Niche

  +1. I find both this and the post it is responding to somewhat confusing. I’ll jot down my perspective and what’s confusing.

  My current take is that ITT-passing is most natural when you are trying to coordinate with someone or persuade someone in-particular. When negotiating with political blocs, it is helpful to know what they want and how they are thinking about a problem in order to convince them of a particular outcome you care about; and when you wish to persuade a particular person, it helps to understand their perspective, so that you can walk from that perspective to yours.

  I think that steelmanning is best for positions rather than for people. Finding the strongest argument for X and for not-X is a pretty fundamental part of figuring out whether X is true.

  It seems to me that Bensinger et al (i.e. along with Yudkowsky/​Karnofsky) are pushing back against forces where people pretend to be having dialogue with them, but keep talking past them for whatever reason; they are performing dialogue and not actually doing it. They claim that one of the common things people do instead is describe the version of their position that seems strongest to them instead of engaging with their actual position.

  I am willing to believe them that this is a common negative experience of theirs, but it is not great to then say that “finding the strongest argument for a position I don’t hold” is “bad”.

  Anyway, the reason I’m confused is that I don’t know which of the two is more ‘normal’ or ‘niche’. They both seem entirely natural in different contexts. Sometimes it’s worth trying to understand people’s perspectives more, sometimes it’s worth just focusing on intellectual reasoning wherever it takes you, and what other people think is simply not relevant.^[1] Which of these situations is more common? That’s not currently clear to me.

  Probably Zack makes a stronger case than I am for steelmaning being more ‘normal’, but after having just now quickly re-read the post I could not pass his ITT well enough to state it; I thought it probably worth jotting down my perspective anyway.

  1. ^

     Aside: I have a hazy sense that Zack (in this post) seems to undervalue learning to pass the ITT of minds very different from one’s own, of finding very different perspectives on the world and coming to understand them. I have found this a fruitful way to see parts of the world I have not seen before (as a pointer, I think it valuable to develop many different shoulder advisors), even while it is the case that most of the time it is best to just talk about how the world works rather than people’s perspectives on it.

• Ben Pace 17 Dec 2025 6:39 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: A high in­tegrity/​epistemics poli­ti­cal coal­i­tion?

  (I nearly wrote a comment saying it was blatantly wrong. For instance, I think I often write things with the intent to expand the space of things that people feel comfortable saying on LessWrong. But I didn’t comment because I felt bad being so agro about one line in a post I hadn’t read in case I misunderstood the context.)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #61 (Tues­day 12/​16)

• Ben Pace 13 Dec 2025 5:54 UTC

  10 points

  5

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Ra­tion­alElf’s Shortform

  I think the answer is either “you don’t know enough about the specifics to have actionable advice” or “return to basic principles”. I generally think that, had they been open about Altman blatantly lying to the board about things, and that Murati and Sutskever were the leaders of the firing, then I think there would’ve been (a) less scapegoating and (b) it would’ve been more likely that Altman would’ve failed his coup.

  But I don’t know the details to be confident about actionable advice here.

• Ben Pace 12 Dec 2025 0:34 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: JohnofCharleston’s comment on: Fol­low-through on Bay Solstice

  Most of the people I heard from at the afterparty had not been to Solstice. Several didn’t even know what it was.

  Interesting. Could be good to have spaces that are for Solstice-attendees-only, if this were to continue to be the case.

• Ben Pace 11 Dec 2025 19:46 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Sonia Albrecht’s comment on: The Inkhaven Residency

  Nothing in stone yet, but we’re currently considering running it again within the next 6 months.

• Ben Pace 10 Dec 2025 18:48 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: William Howard’s comment on: The Inkhaven Residency

  Not gonna link because I don’t want people filling it out, but 80% of the determination was from the question “Please link to 1-5 pieces of writing of yours (public or private) that you think are your best pieces of writing. Something you’re proud of, or that shows what you’re capable of. For each, please give a brief description of what it is.”

• 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)

• 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

  5 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

  13 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; 5 points)