Ben Pace

• Ben PaceMay 5, 2025, 7:26 AM

  6 points

  0

  on: Ac­countabil­ity Sinks

  I liked reading these examples; I wanted to say, it initially seemed to me a mistake not to punish Wascher, whose mistake led to the death of 35 people.

  I have a weak heuristic that, when you want enforce rules, costs and benefits aren’t fungible. You do want to reward Wascher’s honesty, but I still think that if you accidentally cause 35 people to die this is evidence that you are bad at your job, and separately it is very important to disincentivize that behavior for others who might be more likely to make that mistake recklessly. There must be a reliable punishment for that kind of terrible mistake.

  So you must fire her and bar her from this profession, or fine her half a year’s wages, or something. If you also wish to help her, you should invest in supporting her get into a new line of work with which she can support her family, or something. You can even make her net better off for having helped uncover a critical mistake and saving future lives. But people should know that there was a cost and there will be if they do so in future.

  Or at least this is what my weak heuristic says.

• Ben PaceMay 1, 2025, 9:42 PM

  6 points

  9

  in reply to: Casey_’s comment on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  I don’t think that propaganda must necessarily involve lying. By “propaganda,” I mean aggressively spreading information or communication because it is politically convenient /​ useful for you, regardless of its truth (though propaganda is sometimes untrue, of course).

  When a government puts up posters saying “Your country needs YOU” this is intended to evoke a sense of duty and a sense of glory to be had; sometimes this sense of duty is appropriate, but sometimes your country wants you to participate in terrible wars for bad reasons. The government is saying it loudly because for them it’s convenient for you to think that way, and that’s not particularly correlated with the war being righteous or with the people who decided to make such posters even having thought much about that question. They’re saying it to win a war, not to inform their populace, and that’s why it’s propaganda.

  Returning to the Amodei blogpost: I’ll happily concede that you don’t always need to give reasons for your beliefs when expressing them—context matters. But in every context—tweets, podcasts, ads, or official blogposts—there’s a difference between sharing something to inform and sharing it to push a party line.

  I claim that many people have asked why Anthropic believes it’s ethical for them to speed up AI progress (by contributing to the competitive race), and Anthropic have rarely-if-ever given a justification of it. Senior staff keep indicating that not building AGI is not on the table, yet they rarely-if-ever show up to engage with criticism or to give justifications for this in public discourse. This is a key reason why it reads to me as propaganda, because it’s an incredibly convenient belief for them and they state it as though any other position is untenable, without argument and without acknowledging or engaging with the position that it is ethically wrong to speed up the development of a technology they believe has a 10-20% chance of causing human extinction (or a similarly bad outcome).

  I wish that they would just come out, lay out the considerations for and against building a frontier lab that is competing to reach the finish line first, acknowledge other perspectives and counterarguments, and explain why they made the decision they have made. This would do wonders for the ability to trust them.

  (Relatedly, I don’t believe the Machines of Loving Grace essay is defending the position that speeding up AI is good; the piece in fact explicitly says it will not assess the risks of AI. Here are my comments at the time on that essay also being propaganda.)

• Ben PaceMay 1, 2025, 6:58 PM

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Casey_’s comment on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  I’m saying that he is presenting it as something he believes from his place of expertise and private knowledge without argument, because it is something that is exceedingly morally and financially beneficial to him (he gets to make massive money and not be a moral monster), rather than because he has any evidence, and he stated it without evidence.

  It is a similar sentence to if a President of a country who just initiated war said “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life it’s that war is inevitable, and there’s just a question of who wins and how to make sure it’s over quickly”, in a way that means they should be absolved of responsibility for initiating war.

  Edit: Just as Casey B was writing his reply below, I edited an example out of Mark Zuckerberg saying something like “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career, it’s that social media is good, and the only choice is which sort of good social media we have”. Leaving this note so that ppl aren’t confused by his reply.

• Ben PaceMay 1, 2025, 1:17 AM

  4 points

  0

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

  Can you expand on this? How can you tell the difference, and does it make much of a difference in the end (e.g., if most people get corrupted by power regardless of initial intentions)?

  But I don’t believe most people get corrupted by power regardless of initial intentions? I don’t think Francis Bacon was corrupted by power, I don’t think James Watt was corrupted by power, I don’t think Stanislav Petrov was corrupted by power, and all of these people had far greater influence over the world than most people who are “corrupted by power”.

  I’m hearing you’d be interested in me saying more words about the difference in what it looks like to be motivated by responsibility versus power-seeking. I’ll say some words, can see if they help.

  • I think someone motivated by responsibility often will end up looking more aligned with their earlier self over time even as they grow and change, will often not accept opportunities for a lot of power/​prestige/​money because they’re uninteresting to them, will often make sacrifices of power/​prestige for ethical reasons, will pursue a problem they care about long after most would give up or think it likely to be solved.

  • I think someone primarily seeking power will be much more willing to do things that pollute the commons or break credit-allocation mechanisms to get credit, and generally game a lot of systems that other people are earnestly rising through. They will more readily pivot on what issue they say they care about or are working on because they’re not attached to the problem, but to the reward for solving the problem, and many rewards can be gotten from lots of different problems. They’ll be more guided by what’s fashionable right now, and more attuned to it. They’ll maneuver themselves in order to be able to politically work with whoever has power that they want, regardless of the ethics/​competence/​corruption of those people.

  > As a background model, I think if someone wants to take responsibility for some part of the world going well, by-default this does not look like “situating themselves in the center of legible power”.

  And yet, Eliezer, the writer of “heroic responsibility” is also the original proponent of “build a Friendly AI to take over the world and make it safe”.

  Building an AGI doesn’t seem to me like a very legible mechanism of power, or at least it didn’t in the era Eliezer pursued it (where it wasn’t also credibly “a path to making billions of dollars and getting incredible prestige”). The word ‘legible’ was doing a lot of work in the sentence I wrote.

  Another framing I sometimes look through (H/​T Habryka) is constrained vs unconstrained power. Having a billion dollars is unconstrained power, because you can use it to do a lot of different things – buy loads of different companies or resources. Being an engineer overlooking missile-defense systems in the USSR is very constrained, you have an extremely well-specified set of things you can control. This changes the adversarial forces on you, because in the former case a lot of people stand to gain a lot of different possible things they want if they can get leverage over you, and they have to be concerned about a lot of different ways you could be playing them. So the pressures for insanity are higher. Paths that give you the ability to influence very specific things that route through very constrained powers are less insanity-inducing, I think, and I think most routes that look like “build a novel invention in a way that isn’t getting you lots of money/​status along the way” are less insanity-inducing, and I rarely find the person to have become as insane as some of the tech-company CEOs have. I also think people motivated by taking responsibility for fixing a particular problem in the world are more likely to take constrained power, because… they aren’t particularly motivated by all the other power they might be able to get.

  I don’t suspect I addressed your cruxes here so far about whether this idea of heroic responsibility is/​isn’t predictably misused. I’m willing to try again if you wish, or if you can try pointing again to what you’d guess I’m missing.

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #33 (Tues­day 5/​6)

• Ben PaceApr 29, 2025, 5:33 AM

  10 points

  1

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  Not sure I get your overall position. But I don’t believe all humans are delusional about the most important questions in their lives. See here for an analysis of pressures on people that can cause them to be insane on a topic. I think you can create inverse pressures in yourself, and you can also have no pressures and simply use curiosity and truth-seeking heuristics. It’s not magic to not be delusional. It just requires doing the same sorts of cognition you use to fix a kitchen sink.

• Ben PaceApr 29, 2025, 12:59 AM

  11 points

  5

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  Not only would most people be hopelessly lost on these questions (“Should I give up millions-of-dollars-and-personal-glory and then still probably die just because it is morally right to do so?”), they have also picked up something that they cannot put down. These companies have 1,000s of people making millions of dollars, and they will reform in another shape if the current structure is broken apart. If we want to put down what has been picked up more stably, we must use other forces that do not wholly arise from within the companies.

• Ben PaceApr 28, 2025, 11:37 PM

  51 points

  20

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

  My sense is that most of the people with lots of power are not taking heroic responsibility for the world. I think that Amodei and Altman intend to achieve global power and influence but this is not the same as taking global responsibility. I think, especially for Altman, the desire for power comes first relative to responsibility. My (weak) impression is that Hassabis has less will-to-power than the others, and that Musk has historically been much closer to having responsibility be primary.

  I don’t really understand this post as doing something other than asking “on the margin are we happy or sad about present large-scale action” and then saying that the background culture should correspondingly praise or punish large-scale action. Which is maybe reasonable, but alternatively too high level of a gloss. As per the usual idea of rationality, I think whether you are capable of taking large-scale action in a healthy way is true in some worlds and not in others, and you should try to figure out which world you’re in.

  The financial incentives around AI development are blatantly insanity-inducing on the topic and anyone should’ve been able to guess that going in, I don’t think this was a difficult question. Though I guess someone already exceedingly wealthy (i.e. already having $1B or $10B) could have unusually strong reason to not be concerned about that particular incentive (and I think it is the case Musk has seemed differently insane than the others taking action in this area, and lacking in some of the insanities).

  However I think most moves around wielding this level of industry should be construed as building an egregore more powerful than you. The founders/​CEOs of the AI big-tech companies are not able to simple turn their companies off, nor their industry. If they grow to believe their companies are bad for the world, either they’ll need to spend many years dismantling /​ redirecting them, or else they’ll simply quit/​move on and some other person will take their place. So it’s still default-irresponsible even if you believe you can maintain personal sanity.

  Overall I think taking responsibility for things is awesome and I wish people were doing more of it and trying harder. And I wish people took ultimate responsibility for as big of a thing they can muster. This is not the same as “trying to pull the biggest lever you can” or “reaching for power on a global level”, those are quite different heuristics; grabbing power can obviously just cost you sanity, and often those pulling the biggest lever they can are doing so foolishly.

  As a background model, I think if someone wants to take responsibility for some part of the world going well, by-default this does not look like “situating themselves in the center of legible power”. Lonely scientist/​inventor James Watt spent his early years fighting poverty before successfully inventing better steam engines, and had far more influence by helping cause the industrial revolution than most anyone in government did during his era. I think confusing “moving toward legible power” for “having influence over the world” is one of the easiest kinds of insanity.

• Ben PaceApr 28, 2025, 9:05 PM

  13 points

  10

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  I think that Anthropic is doing some neat alignment and control work, but it is also the company most effectively incentivizing people who care about existential risk to sell out, to endorse propaganda, silence themselves, and get on board with the financial incentives of massive monetization and capabilities progress. In this way I see it as doing more damage than OpenAI (though OpenAI used to have this mantle pre-Anthropic, while the Amodei siblings were there and with Christiano as researcher and Karnofsky on the board).

  I don’t really know the relative numbers, in my mind the uncertainty I have spans orders of magnitude. The numbers are all negative.

• Ben PaceApr 27, 2025, 4:53 AM

  10 points

  18

  on: “The Ur­gency of In­ter­pretabil­ity” (Dario Amodei)

  I couldn’t get two sentences in without hitting propaganda, so I set it aside. But I’m sure it’s of great political relevance.

  What links here?

  • AI #115: The Evil Ap­pli­ca­tions Division by Zvi (May 8, 2025, 1:40 PM; 9 points)

[LAPTOP REQUIRED] Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #32 (Tues­day 04/​29)

• Ben PaceApr 21, 2025, 8:31 PM

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: aog’s comment on: aog’s Shortform

  Key ideas include long timelines, slow takeoff, eventual explosive growth, optimism about alignment, concerns about overregulation, concerns about hawkishness towards China, advocating the likelihood of AI sentience and desirability of AI rights, debating the desirability of different futures, and so on.

  Small semantic note: these are not new ideas to Epoch, they are a new package of positions on ideas predominantly originating from the MIRI/​LW cluster that you earlier mentioned.

• Ben PaceApr 20, 2025, 5:35 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Lucie Philippon’s comment on: CBid­dulph’s Shortform

  Of note: the AI Alignment Forum content is a mirror of LW content, not distinct. It is a strict subset.

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #31 (Tues­day 04/​22)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #30 (Tues­day 04/​15)

• Ben PaceApr 10, 2025, 10:23 PM

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  I wrote this because I am increasingly noticing that the rules for “which worlds to keep in mind/​optimize” are often quite different from “which worlds my spreadsheets say are the most likely worlds”. And that this is in conflict with my heuristics which would’ve said “optimize the world-models in your head for being the most accurate ones – the ones that will give you the most accurate answers to most questions” rather than something like “optimize the world-models in your head for being the most useful ones”.

  (Though the true answer is some more complicated function combining both practical utility and map-territory correspondence.)

  I’m not sure I understand what’s confusing about this.

  I will note that what is confusing to one person need not be confusing to another person. In my experience it is a common state of affairs for one person in a conversation to be confused and the other not (whether it be because the latter person is pre-confused, post-confused, or simply because their path to understanding a phenomena didn’t pass through the state of their interlocutor).

  It seems probable to me that I have found this subject more confusing than have others.

• Ben Pace 8 Apr 2025 21:54 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  Update from chatting with him: he said he was a just freelancer doing a year exclusively with NYT, and he wasn’t in a position to write on behalf of the NYT on the issue (e.g. around their deanonymization policies). This wasn’t satisfying to me, and so I will keep to being off-the-record.

• Ben Pace 5 Apr 2025 0:10 UTC

  34 points

  0

  on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  I occasionally get texts from journalists asking to interview me about things around the aspiring rationalist scene. A few notes on my thinking and protocols for this:

  • I generally think it is pro-social to share information with serious journalists on topics of clear public interest.

  • By-default I speak with them only if their work seems relatively high-integrity. I like journalists whose writing is (a) factually accurate, (b) boring, and (c) do not feel to me to have an undercurrent of hatred for their subjects.

  • By default I speak with them off-the-record, and then offer to send them write-ups of the things I said that they want to quote. This has gone quite well. I’ve felt comfortable speaking in my usual fashion without worrying about nailing each and every phrasing. Then I ask what they’re interested in quoting, and I send them (typically a 1-2 page) google doc on those topics (largely re-stating what I already said to them, and making some improvements /​ additions). Then they tell me which quotes they want to use (typically cutting many sentences or paragraphs half-way). Then I make one or two slight edits and give them explicit permission to quote. I think this has gone quite well and they’ve felt my quotes were substantive and improvements.

  • For the New York Times, I am currently trying out the policy of “I am happy to chat off-the-record. I will also offer quotes by my usual protocol, but I will only give them conditional on you including a mention that I disapprove of the NYT’s de-anonymization policies (which I bring up due to your reckless and negligent behavior that upturned the life of a beloved member of my community).” I am about to try this for the first time, and I expect they will thus not want to use my quotes, and that’s fine by me.

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #29 (Tues­day 04/​08)

• Ben Pace 1 Apr 2025 14:24 UTC

  14 points

  0

  in reply to: williawa’s comment on: LessWrong has been ac­quired by EA

  Oops! Then we have taken that feature down for a bit until further testing is done (and the devs have had a little more sleep).