Ben Pace(Ben)

Karma: 30,728

I’m an admin of this site; I work full-time on trying to help people on LessWrong refine the art of human rationality. (Longer bio.)

I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.

Non-disclosure agreements I have signed: Around 2017 I signed an NDA when visiting the London DeepMind offices for lunch, one covering sharing any research secrets, that was required by all guests before we were allowed me access to the building. I do not believe I have ever signed another NDA.

Ben Pace 11 May 2024 1:52 UTC
12 points
11
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: simeon_c’s Shortform
It might be a good on the current margin to have a norm of publicly listing any non-disclosure agreements you have signed (e.g. on one’s LW profile), and the rough scope of them, so that other people can model what information you’re committed to not sharing, and highlight if it is related to anything beyond the details of technical research being done (e.g. if it is about social relationships or conflicts or criticism).
I have added the one NDA that I have signed to my profile.

Ben Pace 10 May 2024 22:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Error’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
Welcome!
1. Yes. We have two or three (slightly hard to access) laundry machines on-site, and a laundrettes just down the street. I’m not sure what the default situation will end up being, but you’ll be able to do laundry.
2. I’m pretty happy to give people refunds if something surprising happens and they come to the evet. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time if I think someone is abusing my trust somehow.
3. Thanks! Fixed the bug.

Ben Pace 10 May 2024 0:03 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Error’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
Thanks for the questions, and I hope you make it! Here’s are my answers, happy to answer more/follow-ups.
1. Summer Camp is our name for the chill period between the two festival weekends. We’ve already sold ~100 tickets just for Summer Camp, so it’s gonna be active.
2. SFO and OAK. You can get the Bart from SFO and then walk the last 20 mins. Google maps says that there’s also public transport from Oakland (which to be clear is a fair bit closer than SFO). I haven’t gone that route before, I think it might involve buses.
3. There’s a few places people will be sleeping. They both have two showers that are right nearby and then there are lots more communally accessible ones dotted around campus (taking like 30-60 seconds to walk there). We’ll stick a map up.
  1. My guess is in one location it’ll be 8 people for the 2 showers, and in the other location it could get to be many more people, and extra folks will need to do a little walking.
4. About 4 are one block away in our Ellsworth house. The rest are on site (mostly building E).
5. We had a 250-person event here last year, WiFi was generally fine. A few parts of campus are spotty (typically the outer edges). (We care a lot about WiFi issues and our team is down to help debug them.)

Ben Pace 9 May 2024 19:46 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Nevin Wetherill’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
@Ruby @RobertM

Ben Pace 9 May 2024 14:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I miswrote a bit when I said “relationships”. Yes, names and faces both trigger social recognition, but I meant to make the point that they operate in significantly different ways in the brain, and facial recognition is tuned to processing a lot of emotional and social cues that we aren’t tuned to from text. I have tons of social associations with people’s physical forms that are beyond simply their character.
(A language model helped me write this comment.)

Ben Pace 9 May 2024 14:27 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: metachirality’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
I did find it and we sent him an email, hope he reads it and joins :)

Ben Pace 9 May 2024 0:37 UTC
20 points
21
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I am fairly strongly against having faces, which I think boot up a lot of social instincts that I disprefer on LessWrong. LessWrong is a space where what matters is which argument is true, not who you like / have relationships with. I think some other sort of unique icon could be good.

Ben Pace 7 May 2024 22:42 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Some Experiments I’d Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic
Here’s a quick mockup of what that might look like.
In my head you the voting UI is available after you click to expand and then scroll down to the bottom of the comment.
Added: Oops, I realize I did the quick takes, not the popular comments. Still, the relevant changes are very similar.

Ben Pace 7 May 2024 17:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
Most people do not have the constitution or agency for criminal murder
I think my model of people is that people are very much changed by the affordances that society gives them and the pressures they are under. In contrast with this statement, a lot of hunter-gatherer people had to be able to fight to the death, so I don’t buy that it’s entirely about the human constitution. I think if it was a known thing that you could hire an assassin on an employee and unless you messed up and left quite explicit evidence connecting you, you’d get away with it, then there’d be enough pressures to cause people in-extremis to do it a few times per year even in just high-stakes business settings. Also my impression is that business or political assassinations exist to this day in many countries; a little searching suggests Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, possibly Nigeria, and more.
I generally put a lot more importance on tracking which norms are actually being endorsed and enforced by the group / society as opposed to primarily counting on individual ethical reasoning or individual ethical consciences.
(TBC I also am not currently buying that this is an assassination in the US, but I didn’t find this reasoning compelling.)

Ben Pace 6 May 2024 22:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Parker Conley’s comment on: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
Done.

Ben Pace 5 May 2024 21:06 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dan H’s comment on: Introducing AI Lab Watch
I wouldn’t call this “AI lab watch.” “Lab” has the connotation that these are small projects instead of multibillion dollar corporate behemoths.
This seems like a good point. Here’s a quick babble of alts (folks could react with a thumbs-up on ones that they think are good).
AI Corporation Watch | AI Mega-Corp Watch | AI Company Watch | AI Industry Watch | AI Firm Watch | AI Behemoth Watch | AI Colossus Watch | AI Juggernaut Watch | AI Future Watch
I currently think “AI Corporation Watch” is more accurate. “Labs” feels like a research team, but I think these orgs are far far far more influenced by market forces than is suggested by “lab”, and “corporation” communicates that. I also think the goal here is not to point to all companies that do anything with AI (e.g. midjourney) but to focus on the few massive orgs that are having the most influence on the path and standards of the industry, and to my eye “corporation” has that association more than “company”. Definitely not sure though.

Ben Pace 5 May 2024 20:48 UTC
13 points
2
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
What’s the chance of a 2nd LessOnline?
Um, one part of me is (as is not uncommon) really believes in this event and thinks it’s going to be the best effort investments Lightcone’s ever made (though this part of me currently has one or two other projects and ideas that it believes in maybe even more strongly), that’s part of me is like “yeah this should absolutely happen every year”, though as I say I get this feeling often about projects that often end up looking different to how I dreamed them when they finally show up in reality. I think that part would feel validated by the event turning out to be awesome and people finding it was worthwhile to come. Then there’s the question of how much resources Lightcone actually has and whether we’ll successfully fundraise and whether this will be one of the few projects we’re investing a few staff-months in a year from now. I think my probabilities just went from 80% to 50% to 99% to… 30%. Overall it depends on how good this event is, which varies on a log scale.
I think there are worlds where we do it again and invest less effort into it, also there’s worlds where we do it again and invest more effort into it. I think there’s also a bunch of worlds where we’re happy about this event but try a subtly different one next time (e.g. me and a teammate generated like 5 other serious event contenders before this one, including things more like workshops or academic conferences than like large festivals, and perhaps we’ll try a different thing next). I think I like that this event is essentially open-invite and trying to be more big-tent, and I hope to do more things like this, so that even if we change what sorts of events we run anyone will just be able to buy a ticket. There’s also worlds where we stop exploring having an events team for our campus and stop running events.
As one datapoint, in 2021 I organized a 60-person private event called the Sanity & Survival Summit for rationalist folk and folks working professionally on x-risk stuff, and I thought we’d maybe make that a yearly thing, and a year later we sort of last-minute/impromptu ran another version of it called Palmcone (it was in the Bahamas) for 80-100 people, and then we made the Lightcone Offices to try and get a more permanent version of the EA/x-risk things in the Bay, and then we scrapped the whole thing as we uninvested in the professional x-risk/EA ecosystem. That’s a possible trajectory things could take.

Ben Pace 5 May 2024 18:55 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
1. I anticipate the vast majority of people going to each of the events will be locals to the state and landmass respectively, so I don’t think it’s actually particularly costly for them to overlap.
2. That’s unfortunate that you are less likely to come, and I’m glad to get the feedback. I could primarily reply with reasons why I think it was the right call (e.g. helpful for getting the event off the ground, helpful for pinpointing the sort of ideas+writing the event is celebrating, I think it’s prosocial for me to be open about info like this generally, etc) but I don’t think that engages with the fact that it left you personally less likely to come. I still overall think if the event sounds like a good time to you (e.g. interesting conversations with people you’d like to talk to and/or exciting activities) and it’s worth the cost to you then I hope you come :-)

Ben Pace 3 May 2024 23:35 UTC
14 points
5
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
I’m probably missing something simple, but what is 356? I was expecting a probability or a percent, but that number is neither.

Ben Pace 3 May 2024 21:39 UTC
19 points
10
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: William_S’s Shortform
Does anyone know if it’s typically the case that people under gag orders about their NDAs can talk to other people who they know signed the same NDAs? That is, if a bunch of people quit a company and all have signed self-silencing NDAs, are they normally allowed to talk to each other about why they quit and commiserate about the costs of their silence?

Ben Pace 3 May 2024 21:38 UTC
6 points
7
in reply to: O O’s comment on: Please stop publishing ideas/insights/research about AI
Preface: I think this comment will be pretty unpopular here.
I think this is a very unhelpful frame for any discussion (especially so the more high-stakes it is) for the reasons that SlateStarCodex outlines in Against Bravery Debates, and I think your comment would be better with this removed.
Added: I appreciate the edit :)

Ben Pace 3 May 2024 21:16 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
Yep! My guess is I will send one out to people who bought tickets next week, along with various spreadsheets for signing up to activities with (e.g. giving a lightning talk).
(I personally strongly prefer slack for a bunch of UI reasons including threading and especially because I always find the conversational culture on discord disorienting, though I know manifest has a community discord so it might be worth using discord.)

Ben Pace 3 May 2024 1:15 UTC
12 points
3
in reply to: cata’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
Launched a few days ago, the plan is:
- Kids tickets are $50
- There’s daycare purchasable on-site from 10am to 7pm, for like $10/hour if you book ahead of time or $30/hour if you use it on-the-day
- If you want connection to a nanny for outside of those hours we have a service that can help with that at $45/hour.
Happy to get feedback on this, still figuring out what exactly helps parents and how to set it up right.

Ben Pace 23 Apr 2024 4:04 UTC
11 points
4
in reply to: Adam Scholl’s comment on: Paul Christiano named as US AI Safety Institute Head of AI Safety
[Added April 28th: In case someone reads my comment without this context: David has made a number of worthwhile contributions to discussions of biological existential risks (e.g. 1, 2, 3) as well as worked professionally in this area and his contributions on this topic are quite often well-worth engaging with. Here I just intended to add that in my opinion early on in the covid pandemic he messed up pretty badly in one or two critical discussions around mask effectiveness and censoring criticism of the CDC. Perhaps that’s not saying much because the base rate for relevant experts dealing with Covid is also that they were very off-the-mark. Furthermore David’s June 2020 post-mortem of his mistakes was a good public service even while I don’t agree with his self-assessment in all cases. Overall I think his arguments are often well-worth engaging with.]
I’m not in touch with the ground truth in this case, but for those reading along without knowing the context, I’ll mention that it wouldn’t be the first time that David has misrepresented what people in the Effective Altruism Biorisk professional network believe^[1].
(I will mention that David later apologized for handling that situation poorly and wasting people’s time^[2], which I think reflects positively on him.)
1. ^
  See Habryka’s response to Davidmanheim’s comment here from March 7th 2020, such as this quote.
  Overall, my sense is that you made a prediction that people in biorisk would consider this post an infohazard that had to be prevented from spreading (you also reported this post to the admins, saying that we should “talk to someone who works in biorisk at at FHI, Openphil, etc. to confirm that this is a really bad idea”).
  We have now done so, and in this case others did not share your assessment (and I expect most other experts would give broadly the same response).
2. ^
  See David’s own June 25th reply to the same comment.

Ben Pace 19 Apr 2024 21:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
The first sounds like the sort of thing that turns out to be surprisingly useful (nobody ever gives me health advice). Mm, maybe folks can agree-react to this sentence if they too want to go to such a session?