Ben Pace

Karma: 36,226

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 1 Oct 2025 2:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
It’s useful if it gets debated (and I have to say, I haven’t noticed this debate)
FYI it is a hypothetical example.

Ben Pace 1 Oct 2025 2:22 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important [IABIED Resources]
My current model is that the VNM theorems are the best available theorems for modeling rational agents. Insofar as that’s accurate, it’s correct to say that they’re not the final theorems, but it’s kind of anti-helpful to throw out their conclusions? This seems similar to saying that there are holes in Newton’s theory of gravity, therefore choosing to throw out any particular prediction of the theory. It still seems like it’s been foundational for building game theory and microeconomic modeling and tons of other things, and so it’s very important to note, if it is indeed the case, that the implications for AI are “human extinction”.

Ben Pace 1 Oct 2025 2:16 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important [IABIED Resources]
As Jan Kulveit also commented, the MIRI corrigibility paper uses a very specific set of assumptions about rational/intelligent agents including VNM with specific kinds of utility functions, which I think is too strong, and there doesn’t seem to be better theory supporting it
Are there other better theories of rational agents? My current model of the situation is “this is the best theory we’ve got, and this theory says we’re screwed” rather than “but of course we should be using all of these other better theories of agency and rationality”.

Ben Pace 30 Sep 2025 22:27 UTC
12 points
−3
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
Some instincts:
- Try hard to name the positive things that different groups believe in rather than simply what they don’t like.
- Try hard to name their strengths than simply what (others might see as) their flaws.
- Default to talk fairly abstractly when possible, to avoid accidentally re-litigating a lot of specific conflicts that aren’t necessary, and avoid making people feel singled out. (This is somewhat in conflict with the virtues of concreteness and precision; not quite sure how to describe the synthesis of these.)
- Be very hesitating to reify groups or forces when it’s not necessary. Due to the way human psychology works, it’s very easy to bring into existence a political group or battle that didn’t exist by careless use of words and names. I think the biggest risk is in reifying groups or tribes or conflicts that don’t exist and don’t need to exist. (Link to me writing about this before.)
For instance, if Tom proposes a group norm of always including epistemic statuses at the top of posts, and there’s a conflict about it, there are better and worse ways of naming sides.
- “The people who hate Tom” and “The people who like Tom” is worse than “The people for mandatory epistemic statuses” and “The people against mandatory epistemic statuses”.
- Also “The people who care about epistemics” and “The people who don’t care about epistemics” is worse relative to “The people who care about epistemics” vs “The people who care about creative freedom in posts” (or whatever captures the actual counterarguments and the values being traded off).
Of course, don’t say false things, these are heuristics to help things stay healthy and counteract humans biases, rather than universal truths.

Ben Pace 30 Sep 2025 3:23 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
I don’t have examples easily to hand, but my impression (sadly) was that it was too often misused, for when someone disagreed with an argument, to mark it as locally invalid rather than simply disagreeing.
Perhaps if people learn to use “weak argument” instead in those situations, I might add it back in later; or perhaps I can find a secret third react which better gets them what they are looking for (e.g. “I don’t think that this follows” or “I reject this step of the argument”) that they would correctly use even if “locally invalid” is added back in.

Ben Pace 29 Sep 2025 22:10 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
I think I regularly want to say goodbye at the end of a thread, but I don’t think I regularly want to tell people that the thread is no longer a good use of my time. To some extent they’re logically similar but I think the choice to leave a dinner saying “Marginal time at this dinner is no longer worth the opportunity cost for me” is kind of silly, and saying “I just wanted to say goodbye, I’m headed out now!” is standard and normal.

Ben Pace 29 Sep 2025 22:05 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Reasons to sell frontier lab equity to donate now rather than later
I reckon it’s a small relative effect on the bigger capabilities pool, but a big relative effect on the smaller safety pool, in terms of raising the level of talent it can compete for.

Ben Pace 29 Sep 2025 21:58 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: Reasons to sell frontier lab equity to donate now rather than later
It would make it more competitive with AI capabilities work, diminishing the massive incentive to do the one that kills us rather than the one that prevents the killing.
(Not that I endorse all safety projects as really being safety projects; nor all capabilities projects as being on-the-path-to-extinction capabilites projects.)

Ben Pace 29 Sep 2025 17:22 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Jan Betley’s comment on: Jan Betley’s Shortform
I’m on retatrutide atm and my mood is a bit lower: this is due to me severely undereating each day and simply lacking energy. For instance, I lie in bed for way longer in the mornings because of lack of energy to get up.
Could this be the cause for you?

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 23:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Oops, I forgot that I actually added 18 reacts! We now also have “Sad”.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 23:01 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Haiku’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
For one, it’s very rare to need to point out that an argument is “locally valid”, so the reaction is one of the least used reacts we have. For two, I think “locally invalid” is actually often not very helpful in a good discussion? Most arguments people make aren’t deductively sound, they’re probabilistic, and those who disagree are disagreeing with either the strength of evidence, or (rarer) the direction that evidence points. It’s not that you made a mistake of predicate logic, it’s that I think your evidence doesn’t really support your conclusion, and that’s a more substantive disagreement. It seems to me that the relevant thing is often that the argument seems weak to the reader, rather than the author’s arguments not making sense.
I am still sad about losing them as part of culture setting, but overall I think they were either not worth the space or not used well, and we still have plenty of good LessWrong culture setting in the reacts palette.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 18:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
It might also work better if it’s use was rate limited, so that it was actually a costly signal.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 16:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
I think the light bulb icon is the correct icon for “Good point!”. If I can find another good image for insightful I’ll probably add it back

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 8:17 UTC
11 points
4
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
I am kind of interested in limiting the use of that react to once-per-month, so that it really means something when it gets used. Not sure whether to actually try this.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 8:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
It’s use was in the bottom third of reacts, and my honest recollection is that it never actually caused elaborating to happen, so I felt comfortable removing it. I have been exploring design space for a react that is more like “I would be interested to read more about this from you!” which feels a bit less demanding and more like something good will happen to the person if they write another comment or even a post on it, which I would like to add if I can find a good design for it (both a good visual image and a good short name).
Interesting, I hadn’t conceived that “nitpick” might be used that way. I don’t know if changing it to “This is a nitpick” would actually solve the problem (perhaps it would be read self-referentially). Perhaps I’ll think of a better idea tomorrow, but if not I’ll wait to see if it actually gets misused.
Epistemic status: Very sleepy while I write this.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 4:18 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: LessWrong Reacts
Thanks, should be fixed now.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 4:00 UTC
58 points
3
on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Announcing new reacts!
The reacts palette has 17 new reacts:
Gone are 11 old reacts who were getting little use, are redundant with the new reacts, and/or in my opinion weren’t being used well (for example, “I’d bet this is false” almost never turned into a bet as I’d hoped, but was primarily used to disagree with added emphasis).
Reacts are a rich way to interact with a body of text, allowing many people to give information about comments, claims, and subclaims more efficiently than writing full comments, and they’re something I love that we have on LessWrong (kudos to Raemon for building them initially!). They’re also a way that people learn our culture – I will re-use Jimrandomh’s classic meme on this topic.
I encourage you to look out for opportunities to use theses new reacts in the coming weeks, to give them a shot at life! We shall see which of these reacts get good use, and whether the use is good for truthseeking. I expect some of them will not, and will later be replaced by even newer reacts.
Feedback on the new reacts is invited, as are proposals for other reacts potentially worth adding.
P.S. There is also a stub of a wiki page on reacts, I would love it if people filled it out and gave LessWrong-culture explanations for the reacts where there is indeed more to say (e.g. “ADDC” comes from this thread).

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 2:10 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops
The period had become part of the URL. I have fixed it.

Ben Pace 28 Sep 2025 0:12 UTC
7 points
3
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Adele Lopez’s Shortform
Then there is the strong belief in the Bay Area that excluding anyone is wrong; also various people who have various problems and have been in the past excluded from places would be triggered by the idea of excluding people from the rationality community.
I just want to say that, while it has in the past been the case that a lot of people were very anti-exclusion, and some people are still that way, I certainly am not and this does not accurately describe Lightcone, and regularly we are involved in excluding or banning people for bad behavior. Most major events we are involved in running of a certain size have involved some amount of this.
I think this is healthy and necessary and the attempt to include everyone or always make sure that whatever stray cat shows up on your doorstep can live in your home, is very unhealthy and led to a lot of past problems and hurtful dynamics.
(There’s lots more details to this and how to do justice well that I’m skipping over, right now I’m just replying to this narrow point.)

Ben Pace 27 Sep 2025 2:16 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Adele Lopez’s Shortform
I don’t actually know baseline rates or rationalist-rates (perhaps someone wants to answer with data from annual rationalist census/survey questions?), so I’m not sure to what extent there is an observation here to explain.
But it does seem to me that there is more of it than baseline; and I think a first explanation has to be a lot of selection effects? I think people likely to radically change their mind about the world and question consensus and believe things that are locally socially destabilizing (e.g. “there is no God” “I am not the gender that matches my biological sex” “the whole world might end soon” etc) are more likely to be (relatively) psychologically unstable people.
Like, some of the people who I think have psychotic/manic episodes around us, are indeed people who you could tell from the first 10 minutes that they were psychologically different from those around them. For example, I once observed someone at a rationalist event failing to follow a simple physical instruction, whilst seeming to not realize they weren’t successfully following the instruction, and I got a distinct crazy-alarm from them; I later learned that they had been institutionalized a lot earlier in their life with psychotic episodes and were religious.
Still, I do think I’ve seen immense mental strain put on people otherwise relatively psychologically healthy. I think a lot of people do very hard things with little support net, that have caused them very bad experiences. But on the other hand, I really see very few severely bad mental episodes in the people I actually know and meet (I’m struggling to think of a single one in recent years). And for events I run, I generally select against people who exhibit strong signs of mental instability. I don’t want them to explode, have terrible experience, and cause other people terrible experiences.
Probably CFAR has had much more risk of this than Lightcone? CFAR more regularly has strangers come to an intense event for many days in a row about changing your mind and your identity to become stronger, disconnected from your normal life that whole time, whereas I have run fewer such events (perhaps Inkhaven! that will be the most intense event I have run. I have just made a note to my team to have check-ins about how the residents are on this dimension, thanks for prompting that to happen).
I’m not really sure what observations Adele is making / thinking about, and would be interested to read more of those (anonymized, or abstracted, naturally).
Added: I just realized that perhaps Adele just wanted this thread to be between Adele/Anna. Oops, if so.