Ben Pace

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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 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 Oct 12, 2025, 8:41 PM
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in reply to: Katalina Hernandez’s comment on: Katalina Hernandez’s Shortform
I thought this meant she endorsed the title as her beliefs, so in case anyone else was confused, she has endorsed the book as worth reading, but not (to my knowledge) endorsed its thesis as “what I believe”.
Here’s what she writes:
Although, in general, I disagree with catastrophic framings of AI risk (which have been exploited by AI CEOs to increase interest in their products, as I recently wrote in my newsletter), the AI safety debate is an important one, and it concerns all of us.

There are differing opinions on the current path of AI development and its possible futures. There are also various gray zones and unanswered questions on possible ways to mitigate risk and avoid harm.

Yudkowsky has been researching AI alignment for over 20 years, and together with Soares, he has built a strong argument for why AI safety concerns are urgent and why action is needed now. Whether you agree with their tone or not, their book is worth reading.
Seems that she finds Eliezer+Nate credible in their concerns because they are not AI company CEOs but have been working on the problem for 2 decades.

Ben Pace Oct 12, 2025, 5:30 AM
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps
I admit I am a bit confused about the thesis here… I get that accurate behavioral accounting is sometimes tightly related to social punishment such that the attempt to give or defend oneself from punishment provides incentive to lie about the behavior (and attempts to describe the behavior have direct implications for punishment).
But are you further claiming that that all social punishment is identical^[1] to truth-claims about other things (i.e. “reasons for the punishment”)? This seems like an ideal that I aspire to, but not how most people relate to social punishment, where social ostracism can sometimes simply be a matter of fashion or personal preference.
Personally I use phrases like “X is lame” or “X isn’t cool” to intentionally and explicitly set the status of things. I endeavor to always have good reasons for why and to provide them (or at least to have them ready if requested), but the move itself does not require justification in order to successfully communicate that something is having its status lowered or is something that I oppose. People would often happily just accept the status-claims without reasons, similar to learning what is currently ‘in fashion’.
1. ^
  On reflection I don’t quite mean identical to, but something more like “Is a deterministic function of truth-claims about good/bad behavior, taking that-and-only-that as input”.

Ben Pace Oct 10, 2025, 7:42 PM
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
I think of “It seems” as coming from the view from nowhere. I say “It seems to me” to own it, unless I mean to make the active claim that I believe it will seem this way to everyone.
“Arguably” feels super weak to me. I would only use it if I actively wanted to distance myself from a view. Almost anything is ‘arguable’ in principle.

Ben Pace Oct 9, 2025, 9:49 PM
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
Probably this isn’t the exclusive reason, but typically I use “I think” whenever I want to rule out the interpretation that I am implying we all agree on my claim. If I say “It was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if you agree with me; if I say “I think it was a mistake for you to paint this room yellow” this is more natural if I’m informing you of my opinion but I expect you to disagree.
This is not a universal rule, and fwiw I do think there’s something good about clear and simple writing that cuts out all the probably-unnecessary qualifiers, but I think this is a common case where I find it worth adding it in.

Ben Pace Oct 7, 2025, 7:12 PM
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in reply to: Adam Scholl’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
Datapoint: I’m currently setting up a recording studio at Lighthaven, and I am using them all the time to get guides for things like “how to change a setting on this camera” or “how to use this microphone” or “how to use this recording software”.
Yes, they confabulate menus and things a lot, but as long as I keep uploading photos of what I actually see, they know the basics much better than me (e.g. what bit rate to set the video vs the audio, where to look to kill the random white noise input I’m getting, etc).
I’d say they confabulate like 50% of the time but that they’re still a much more effective search engine for me than google, and can read the manual much faster than me. My guess is I simply couldn’t do some of the projects I’m doing without them.

Ben Pace Oct 7, 2025, 7:02 PM
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in reply to: gustaf’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Awesome, thanks so much gustaf!
I’ve re-arranged the order a little bit to have some of the more common ones first.
Yeah, I have been thinking about linking it from the reacts menu. Will think about that next time I ship some changes. (I’ll be more inclined to do that if there are more explanations and links and culture and stuff.)

Ben Pace Oct 6, 2025, 5:19 AM
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on: Notes on fatalities from AI takeover
Curated. This is a topic that is getting a ton of attention at the minute, and the post does a decent job at laying out relevant considerations and summarizing some prior debate.
(I disagree with the conclusion but it seems positive to me to curate something with a different conclusion than the recent book on the issue.)

Ben Pace Oct 5, 2025, 11:07 PM
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in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Notes on fatalities from AI takeover
Link to Nate’s comments.

Ben Pace Oct 4, 2025, 6:19 AM
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in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform
Further follow-up: Guido Reichstadter wraps up after 30 days. Impressively long! And a bit longer than I’d guessed.

Ben Pace Oct 3, 2025, 10:11 PM
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in reply to: wdmacaskill’s comment on: A Reply to MacAskill on “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
I think I’m particularly triggered by all this because of a conversation I had last year with someone who takes AI takeover risk very seriously and could double AI safety philanthropy if they wanted to. I was arguing they should start funding AI safety, but the conversation was a total misfire because they conflated “AI safety” with “stop AI development”: their view was that that will never happen, and they were actively annoyed that they were hearing what they considered to be such a dumb idea. My guess was that EY’s TIME article was a big factor there.
Mandatory check: was this billionaire a sociopath who made their money unethically or illegally (perhaps through crypto), like the last time you persuaded someone in this position to put tons of their philanthropy into AI safety?
(Perhaps you can show that they weren’t, but given your atrocious track record these datapoints shouldn’t really be taken seriously without double-checking.)
(As a suggestion, you could DM the name to me or anyone in this thread and have them report back their impression of whether the person is a crook or obviously unethical, without releasing the identity widely.)

Ben Pace Oct 3, 2025, 6:10 PM
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in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important (i.e. “Whence the high MIRI confidence in alignment difficulty?”)
Yeah but “this theory sometimes correctly predicts the economy in a way no other theory has been capable of, and sometimes gets things totally wrong, and this theory says AI will cause extinction” is not unjustly privileging the hypothesis. It’s a mistake to say that theory “just isn’t very informative” when it’s been incredibly informative on lots of issues, even while mistaken on others.

Ben Pace Oct 3, 2025, 5:08 PM
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in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important (i.e. “Whence the high MIRI confidence in alignment difficulty?”)
But it’s made tons of accurate predictions in game theory and microeconomics?

Ben Pace Oct 2, 2025, 6:59 PM
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on: Ethical Design Patterns
Curated! Thanks for the post.
I am having a hard time explaining why I’m curating this. I think for me this post is helping me move ethics from some mystical thing, into an engineering/design problem, which is how I think a lot of it should be thought of. I recently having been reading a book on the classic virtues, and it makes them sound so dreary and uncompelling; this account seems more true and healthier.
I think the examples were great and really illustrated this well. But I agree with a comment (from Wei Dai) that this post is weak on proving that the presence or lack of good ethical design patterns was critical in the success or failure of different systems, rather than other factors.
I hope to see more writing about concrete cases, and more work to help turn our consequentialist analyses into ethical design patterns / folk ethics.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 10:54 PM
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in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Thx – yeah seems that something broke when I shipped it, I should ship a fix in the next day or two.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 6:57 PM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I see! That makes sense. I hoped it was clear from the surrounding context in the thread, but I will endeavor in future to link to my comments elsethread for reference.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 6:55 PM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I think the dynamic Thomas pointed to is more helpful and accurate than the specifics, which seem to me like inaccurate glosses.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 6:55 PM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I agree that ranting and emotional writing is part of a healthy processing of information in humans. Insofar as someone is ranting imprecisely and recklessly about groups and their attitudes, when trying to understand local politics, I wish that some care is taken to note that it’s not the default standard for comments, that it’s more likely to produce inaccuracies and be misleading, rather than to walk straight into it seemingly unaware of the line being crossed. It’s the standard thing about line crossing: the problem isn’t in choosing to cross the line, it’s in seemingly not being aware that there is a line at all.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 5:58 PM
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
The comment painted lots of groups of people with a broad brush, mainly associating them with a negative feelings that I don’t believe most of them experience very much or at all, it (I think?) implied it had named all the groups (while naming ~none of the groups I natively think of), and then said that naming groups wasn’t a problem to be worried about.
It’s not norm-violating, but IMO it was not a good move in the dance of “sanely discuss local politics”.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 5:28 PM
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
It’s not content free! I gave a bunch of examples of useful heuristics for navigating discussions of tribalism in my other comment, and Thomas did the opposite of most of them (named groups by things they didn’t like rather than things they stood for, avoid carelessly reifying group attitudes, avoid needlessly relitigating old conflicts).
I also don’t think it’s tone-policing. It’s about how we talk about a subject that humans are pretty biased about. Seems about as tone policing as if I said “let’s try to discuss the problem from many angles before proposing solutions” and then someone came in and proposed solutions and I pushed back on that. There is real advice about how to discuss difficult topics well and it’s not all centrally free speech violations.

Ben Pace Oct 1, 2025, 4:02 PM
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in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I feel like Ray was trying to open up this conversation with respect and carefulness and then you kind of trampled over that.