Ben Pace

• Ben Pace 18 Aug 2026 11:36 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: kave’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  The only one that I think would meet (c) and make it much easier to resist internal pressures, would be to commit to burn basically everything you earn over ~$100k.

  (“burn”, a word which here means “donate to a random ineffective charity”, which is how I personally burn money)

  If you’re donating it to organization you think are doing good inthe world, then you have motive to keep earning lots of money, and doing whatever the company asks of you. If you’re burning it, then the massive financial and status incentive is massively reduced.

• Ben Pace 16 Aug 2026 23:21 UTC

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: (Re)in­tro­duc­tion of a ra­tio­nal­ist dragon, and clar­ifi­ca­tions on Ziz’s character

  Also the short email they sent that day, to like 100+ ppl going to the CFAR reunion (I assume everyone whose emails they could find), included the phrase “If you do not want to die” twice, followed by metaphors and links to many long and hard to read blogposts, which is definitely enough reason to take seriously the hypothesis that they would bring weapons.

  (Also also, LaSota has written outright that it’s important to do some murders by the time you’re 30 and many other things implying that they are totally on board with killing people. If anybody was picking up a violent streak from her, they were accurately picking up the signals. To be clear, I believe that the shooter concern came from the camp staff, as they were the ones who called the police, but anyone arguing that people were entirely unfair to think the protestors would consider violence are totally wrong, as at least some of the protestors turned out to be extremely pro unlawful violence.)

• Ben Pace 16 Aug 2026 10:35 UTC

  7 points

  3

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform

  Relatedly: Sarah Constantin recently had a neat, short post on “Big-World Intuitions”, which are situations where “the market is much bigger than you, the problem is much bigger than your progress on it, the game is very far from being over, the environment is much bigger than your resource consumption, etc”.

  In my few interactions with Shulman (and other very-high-IQ-yet-modest-people around in EA waters) I have felt this big-world framing to be a key part of their thinking, where many/​most things happening in the world are done by ‘efficient markets’ and ‘efficient processes’, and as such you cannot expect to have much influence overall on the world, and can just focus on doing things with local benefit.

  (Even though often the things described as efficient are not markets, but individual companies, or academic fields, both of which I strongly believe can be visibly and knowably stupid from time to time.)

  In recent years this has been a justification for why it’s entirely ethical to invest in AI and to expect AI companies to be unassailable and to argue you should not cultivate public support for an AI pause, because these things are big and you are small and you could not possibly hope to challenge market incentives. (Of course, there are real forces there, but I don’t believe it’s the end of the story.)

• Ben Pace 12 Aug 2026 15:07 UTC

  8 points

  4

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform

  I am not that confused? The cultures are greatly similar to one another relative to most cultures in the world and they have a fair bit of overlap in people. While I’m talking about the differences, they have more in common than most subculutres. I’d be confused if one of them moved to being being a bodybuilder slash gym bro, or being into K-Pop fandom, or a punk rocker. But not between rationality and EA.

• Ben Pace 12 Aug 2026 12:52 UTC

  7 points

  2

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform

  Aschenbrenner is the face of the fund, which is named “Situational Awareness LP” after his famous essay, and he’s never identified or particularly associated with the rationalists, so I think Eliezer’s primarily going off of that. It’s accurate to say that Shulman has historically been in rationalist scene, but also I think he’s spent a great deal of his career in the EA scene (working with OpenPhil), and EAs would claim him as their own (i.e. many would call him a great EA, which they wouldn’t with Eliezer, Gwern, Zvi, etc), so it’s not inaccurate to call him an EA.

  I hope Eliezer has let Shulman know that he’s lost a lot of respect in Eliezer’s eyes and done terrible things, but I think that given Shulman’s intentionally low profile, it would be somewhat rude to do it as loudly as when talking about Situational Awareness LP (e.g. which has an article about it in the WSJ, but whose article does not mention Shulman).

• Ben Pace 12 Aug 2026 12:41 UTC

  18 points

  6

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform

  There are many important differences in the culture that I don’t know that I can capture in this small margin.

  One frame that I have on the difference, is that rationalists run a lot more on virtue ethics, and EAs lean much more consequentialist. This is not to say that rationalists don’t do tons and tons of consequentialist calculations, they obviously do, but they ultimately still strongly care about virtues (honor, integrity, dignity, honest), whereas EAs are very ready to trade away some abstract concept of virtue for a direct and measurable local outcome. Some of the best people central to the EA cluster have the virtue of being able to ‘go hard’ in ways that people more central to the rat cluster are typically more restrained about. One story I have is that EAs historically have been more willing to say “the project happening this week is the most important thing that has ever happened in my life, and I will sacrifice anything and everything in order to do marginally better on it”, which is kind of cool and also kind of cursed when “everything” includes “treating people in my life with respect” and “not misleading people”.

  Perhaps more importantly, there’s also a lot of hubris that comes through in EA’s confidence about having found the most important thing, that allows EAs to behave in extremely condescending and paternalistic ways toward the rest of the world (i.e. a lot more attempted narrative control, a lot more coordination behind the scenes about what stories to tell journalists and the public). Whereas rationalists are much more in favor of blurting things out (“speak the truth even if your voice trembles”), and in respecting that other people in the world can make better choices with access to more information (e.g. investing much more in honest public discourse and argument).

  (Those are some quick glosses, probably I’d think of like 5 more on the same level if I tried for a few hours.)

De­mon Safety

• Ben Pace 7 Aug 2026 3:12 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Ar­gu­ments for P

  And my experience with Glowfic folks is that, if I ask them to explain the reference, they tell me a 10-20 minute story “skipping most of the details“ and then explain that wasn’t the story they wanted to tell, that was just necessary for “worldbuilding”, before they can even given the 1-paragraph explanation of the story they’re making a reference to.

[CANCELED] Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #92.5 (Tues­day 8/​4)

• Ben Pace 3 Aug 2026 3:44 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk from AI: An Ex­po­si­tion for Mathematicians

  Is it? I have often felt my relationship with a friend strengthen when I frankly tell them that they ought to quit their jobs on ethical and/​or mission grounds. (Prior to this whole AI labs business.)

• Ben Pace 3 Aug 2026 3:41 UTC

  4 points

  0

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

  For most people the answer is “no, there is no process for this”.

  For long-time collaborators or close allies we sometimes make it work, and it’s fine to ask if you know us (e.g. an Inkhavener recently asked me if they could stay for a few weeks as they were in the process of moving to the Bay, and I looked into it but it didn’t work out).

• Ben Pace 2 Aug 2026 22:06 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The High-Con­trol Dy­nam­ics at MAPLE

  To confirm: I copy-pasted the entire document into Pangram, and got 43% AI-generated text.

  

• Ben Pace 2 Aug 2026 16:28 UTC

  16 points

  4

  in reply to: Dean Valentine’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  Here’s Eliezer in the sequences naming two people above his level, one he says is probably smarter than him.

  Jaynes:

  I aspire to Jaynes’s level. I aspire to become as much the master of Artificial Intelligence /​ reflectivity, as Jaynes was master of Bayesian probability theory. I can even plead that the art I’m trying to master is more difficult than Jaynes’s, making a mockery of deference. Even so, and embarrassingly, there is no art of which I am as much the master now, as Jaynes was of probability theory.

  Conway:

  Or...

  ...or I’m strictly dumber than Conway, dominated by him along all dimensions. Maybe, if I could find a young proto-Conway and tell them the basics, they would blaze right past me, solve the problems that have weighed on me for years, and zip off to places I can’t follow.

  Is it damaging to my ego to confess that last possibility? Yes. It would be futile to deny that.

  Have I really accepted that awful possibility, or am I only pretending to myself to have accepted it? Here I will say: “No, I think I have accepted it.” Why do I dare give myself so much credit? Because I’ve invested specific effort into that awful possibility. I am blogging here for many reasons, but a major one is the vision of some younger mind reading these words and zipping off past me. It might happen, it might not.

• Ben Pace 2 Aug 2026 1:34 UTC

  7 points

  1

  in reply to: herschel’s comment on: The High-Con­trol Dy­nam­ics at MAPLE

  I care about the norm of people being able to share politically-sensitive and important information on the internet anonymously, and so I won’t be speculating on the authorship of this document publicly, and encourage others not to as well.

  I might feel differently if it seemed to me like this document outright lied, or the personal attacks were substantially unprovoked, but I do not currently know either of those to be the case, and even if it lied then I might just point that out and move on. (I am looking into it some, I’ll report back if I get any clear updates on whether it has lied.)

• Ben Pace 25 Jul 2026 16:11 UTC

  3 points

  3

  in reply to: bjorkiscool113’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  lol!

  I suspect whether it sounds Orwellian depends on what it’s actually describing, and whether it’s natural to construe it as its opposite.

• Ben Pace 25 Jul 2026 0:12 UTC

  19 points

  8

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  If you believe (as Wei says) that it will be known as “The Long Correction”, then it sounds Orwellian (and similar to “correctional facility”) and I currently believe is a non-starter.

  It… is going to be a grand mission that humanity goes on together? I don’t get the idea of calling grand & important things unimportant names when they are in fact grand & important. Let us not call our era the age of reason, or the enlightenment, for that is too grand; let us call it the age of getting-slightly-better. I think it is good to give grand projects appropriately grand names.

• Ben Pace 24 Jul 2026 23:08 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction

  I chatted with an LLM a little. My favorites were:

  • The Long Reformation

  • The Great Reconstruction

  • The Long Becoming

  These all to me have a character of fixing ourselves and realigning with a new philosophy. “The Long Correction” sounds a little Orwellian; GLaDOS would “correct your behavior”.

• Ben Pace 14 Jul 2026 20:11 UTC

  12 points

  2

  on: Sur­pris­ing facts about the slave trade

  Curated! Thank you for collecting these historical quotes. It is virtuous to make history available, and this helps a lot. I didn’t know that the sailors on slave ships died at a far greater frequency, I didn’t know about the counterarguments in favor of continuing the slave trade, and some of these quotes are very inspiring (“Never, never, will we desist...”). When compiling quotes, I always have a hard time with the tradeoff between making it short/​readable, and giving full context, and I think you did a good job making this quite readable yet letting the primary sources do the talking.

  I appreciate Thirdian’s pushback in the comments, and encoruage anyone who is planning to reference Thomas Clarkson elsewhere to do more research into him (I found asking an LLM for a lot of primary sources to quickly pull up a lot of helpful information).

• Ben Pace 14 Jul 2026 17:53 UTC

  5 points

  1

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: jelly’s Shortform

  Personally I am reading him as saying “if you’re doing something for the first time, talk with someone who has done it before”.

• Ben Pace 30 Jun 2026 20:35 UTC

  68 points

  7

  on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  From Joseph Mitchell’s 1944 article in the New Yorker titled “Thirty-Two Rats from Casablanca”, an account of how New York City worked to prevent an outbreak of the Black Death.

  When the Coast Guardsmen are satisfied a ship is empty of humans, they seal the holds and cabins and open cans of hydrocyanic, liberating the gas. They even fumigate the lifeboats; rats often hide in them. After a certain number of hours—ten for a medium-sized ship—the holds are opened and aired out, and the Coast Guardsmen go below and search for dead rats. The rats are dropped in oil-paper bags and brought to a laboratory in the basement here. They are combed for fleas. The fleas are pounded in a mortar, put into a solution, and injected into guinea pigs. Then each rat is autopsied and examined for signs of plague. Then bits of spleens and livers are snipped out, pooled, and pounded up. They are also put into a solution and injected into guinea pigs. If the fleas or the rats are infected, the pigs sicken and die. We began this work in 1921, and for twenty-two years we injected hundreds of generations of pigs with the fleas and spleens of rats from practically every port in the world without turning up a single Black Death germ. We didn’t want to find any, to be sure, but there were days when we couldn’t help but look upon our work as routine and futile.

  “Now then, late in the evening of January 10, 1943, the French steamship Wyoming arrived from Casablanca, Africa, with a miscellaneous cargo, chiefly wine, tobacco, and vegetable seeds. A big convoy came in that evening, sixty or seventy ships, and we didn’t get to the Wyoming until next day. Casablanca was on the plague list at that time; there had been an outbreak in December, shortly before the Wyoming sailed. The crew was carefully examined. No sign of illness. Then the captain brought out a deratization certificate stating that the ship had recently been fumigated and was free of rats; this certificate later turned out to be worthless. She was allowed to dock at Pier 34, Brooklyn, where she discharged some bags of mail. Next day, she proceeded to Pier 84, Hudson River, and began discharging her cargo. Some rats were seen in her by longshoremen, and on January 13th we went over her and found evidence of infestation. She was allowed to continue unloading. On January 18th we fumigated her at her dock and found twenty rats. We combed and autopsied the rats, and inoculated a guinea pig. Four days later the pig sickened and died. An autopsy indicated plague infection and cultures from its heart blood showed an oval organism which had all the characteristics of Pasteurella pestis. We made a broth of tissue from this pig and inoculated a second pig. It sickened and died. It was the Black Death, no doubt about it. We had found it in the harbor for the first time in forty-three years.

  “In the meantime, the Wyoming had moved from the Hudson to Pier 25, Staten Island, for repairs. On January 29th we went aboard her, removed all excess dunnage and gear to the decks, and ripped open all the enclosed spaces in the holds; we were afraid the hydrocyanic hadn’t penetrated to these spaces. Then we refumigated. Twelve more dead rats were found. On the same day we got in touch with Dr. Stebbins, the Commissioner of Health for the city, and told him about the situation. We were greatly apprehensive. The Wyoming had touched at piers in rat-infested sections in three boroughs and there was, of course, a distinct possibility that infected rats had got ashore and were at that moment wandering around the waterfront, coming in contact with local rats and exchanging fleas. Mr. Holsendorf, the Health Department’s rat consultant, quickly got together some crews of trappers and they began setting break-back traps on the Brooklyn pier, the Manhattan pier, and the Staten Island pier, and in building in the vicinity of each pier. The trapping was done unobtrusively; we were afraid a newspaper might learn of the matter and start a plague scare. Early in February the first batch of rats was sent for autopsies to the laboratory of the Willard Parker Hospital, an institution for contagious diseases, at the foot of East Fifteenth Street. We waited for the report with considerable anxiety. It was negative on every rat, and we began to breathe easier. Mr. Holsendorf and his crews trapped from the end of January to the middle of May and the reports continued to come in negative. At the end of May we concluded that no Wyoming rats had got ashore, and that the city was safe.”

  I posted this substantially because I deeply admire that they did this reliably for twenty-two years before finding an actual case. Though I’ll note that I don’t believe that it is the right call not to inform people that there is high-alert for an outbreak of a deadly plague.