Ben Pace

• 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

  4 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

  4 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?

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #51 (Tues­day 9/​30)

• 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

  5 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.

• Ben Pace 25 Sep 2025 6:12 UTC

  37 points

  11

  in reply to: kyleherndon’s comment on: The Com­pany Man

  It fleshed out a lot of archetypes (e.g. “the person on the inside who thinks they’ll be in the right place at the right time”, “the person who feels they have had a meditation/​emotional insight and this has gotten them over the intellectual hump of not building killing machines”, “the person who believes the AI may kill everyone but did an EV calculation and decided to make lots of money anyway” etc) and ways-the-future-could-go in way more detail than I’ve seen before.

  There are many ideas in here that I’ve heard said offhand but never really dived into, and there’s something very informative and satisfying about seeing them painted in detail. Similar to the difference between a one-sentence description of a painting, and the actual painting.

  Plus lots of fun and dramatic detail to how it’s all woven together.

  These are some of the things that occur to me in answer to your question.

  Yes, I felt much disgust and dismay reading it. I also feel that way about many parts of the real world!

• Ben Pace 23 Sep 2025 19:21 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Liron’s comment on: We Sup­port “If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies”

  You can just ask people to use reacts! I’ve done a few posts like that (example) though I used hidden backend features to do a more complicated setup.

• Ben Pace 23 Sep 2025 18:14 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: We Sup­port “If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies”

  (I agree-reacted to the statement, because I think polling is often a very reasonable default activity. I am not upvoting the post, especially not for a goal of turning the frontpage post list into a space to signal the positions of LW, rather than for interesting and novel arguments and/​or well written explanations.)

  (Added: To be clear Liron did not ask for upvotes; but the post talked about what gets upvoted on frontpage, and then posted the poll claim, which seemed suggestive to me of a standard terrible failure mode for discussion spaces; so I want to disclaim upvoting in order to make the frontpage signal positions to low-engagement LW readers.)