Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

Karma: 5,880

″ (...) the term technical is a red flag for me, as it is many times used not for the routine business of implementing ideas but for the parts, ideas and all, which are just hard to understand and many times contain the main novelties.”
- Saharon Shelah
”A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” - Alexander Pope

As a true-born Dutchman I endorse Crocker’s rules.

For my most of my writing see my short-forms (new shortform, old shortform)

Twitter: @FellowHominid

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/afdago/home

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 13 Sep 2025 10:32 UTC
18 points
0
in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
… and so at long last John found the answer to alignment
The answer was Love
and it had always has been

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 5 Sep 2025 22:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Anthropic’s leading researchers acted as moderate accelerationists
Does the appriopriate [soft] reference class scale with intersimulizability of agents?
i.e. generally greater more computationally powerful agents are better at simulating other agents and this will generically push towards the regime where FDT gives a larger reference class.
The asymptote would be some sort of acausal society of multiverse higher-order cooperators.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 23 Aug 2025 15:02 UTC
83 points
−1
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
Fwiw I’ve found Said’s comments to be clear, crisp and valuable. I don’t recall being ever annoyed by his comments and found him a most useful bloodhound for bad epistemic practices and rhetorics. Many cases that Said’s comment is the only good, clear, and crisp critic of vagueposting and applauselighting.
The examples in this post don’t seem compelling at all. One of the primary examples seems to be Duncan who comes off [from a distance] as thin-skinned and obscurantist, emotionally blowing up at very fair criticism.
Despite my disagreement I endorse Habryka unilaterally taking these kinds of decisions and approve of his transparency and conduct in this matter.
Farewell, lesswrong gadfly. You will be missed.
What links here?
- Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away? by Sting (2 Sep 2025 0:08 UTC; 47 points)
- Said Achmiz's comment on Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation) by habryka (23 Aug 2025 20:18 UTC; 0 points)

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 19 Aug 2025 18:11 UTC
4 points
−4
in reply to: Leon Lang’s comment on: Leon Lang’s Shortform
Agreed. The primary thing Solomonoff induction doesn’t take into account is computational complexity/ compute. But… you can simply include a reasonable time-penalty and most of the results mostly go through. It becomes a bit more like logical inductors.
Solomonoff induction also dovetails (hah) nicely with the fact that next-token prediction was all you need for intelligence.^[1]
1. ^
  well almost, the gap is exactly AIXI

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 8 Aug 2025 10:41 UTC
−4 points
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Inscrutability was always inevitable, right?
MIRI lost the Mandate of Heaven smh

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 7 Aug 2025 9:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
Oh wild. It’s clearly propaganda. But also incredibly valuable information. itsThe West would so well to listen carefully to what adversaries are saying. They are certainly listening carefully to us!
Thanks for the alert Thomas. Subscribed.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 29 Jul 2025 11:34 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Alex_Altair’s Shortform
1. Gemini: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m6A5Rkf0NzPsCMt8c1Qb-o9pTWup-zk5epQNYX_cdo4/edit?usp=sharing
  
  2. Chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/share/6888b1b6-0e88-8011-8b41-d675d3aefb04
  
  seems to me that there is a lot of good content here already.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 28 Jul 2025 13:17 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Alex_Altair’s Shortform
What does Gemini say? Seems like a perfect set of questions to ask a modern LLM.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 22 Jul 2025 18:36 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: williawa’s comment on: williawa’s Shortform
@Dmitry Vaintrob

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 22 Jul 2025 18:33 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Why Reality Has A Well-Known Math Bias
Yes—I would say this is one of the many paradoxes solved by UDASSA.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 19 Jul 2025 12:44 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: mattmacdermott’s comment on: mattmacdermott’s Shortform
What do you mean?

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 19 Jul 2025 12:29 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
academia is too broad of a term. most of math, physics, theoretical CS, paleontology, material sciences, engineering, and some branches of economics, biology, engineering, (computational) neuroscience, (computational) linguistics, statistics etc are doing well and overall reward intellectual freedom and deep work. in terms of people this is a small minority of total academics, probably <5%.
It is true that many subfields, or even entire domains of science are diseased disciplines. Most of the research is marginal, irrelevant, reinventing the wheel, trivial, tautological, p-hacked and often even fraudulent. One can point to the usual suspects in the humanities and the social sciences but disciplines where the majority of research is noise, nonsense or even net-negative plausibly also includes machine learning and (I’m told) medicine.
Is that disappointing? Perhaps. But this still describes hundred of thousands or millions of people all over the world pushing the frontier of knowledge.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 13 Jul 2025 11:45 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
Mmm.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 10 Jul 2025 12:49 UTC
2 points
0
on: A Theory of Structural Independence
What is meant by ‘causal direction’ ? Where in the paper is this referring to?

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 8 Jul 2025 9:49 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: sam’s comment on: sam’s Shortform
Able activists are conflict theorists. They understand the logic of power & propaganda & cultish devotion at an intuitive level. To become an effective soldier one needs to excise a part of the brain devoted to evenkeeled uncertainty, nuance, intellectual empathy, self-doubt.
Conflict theorists may do great good as readily as they may do great harm. They wield a dangerous force, easily corruptible, yet perhaps necessary.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 7 Jul 2025 12:15 UTC
7 points
0
on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
Assuming a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2027/2028 what is the most sensible investment strategy?
TSMC puts seem sensible. What are others?

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 1 Jul 2025 11:13 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Murfet’s comment on: Zach Furman’s Shortform
I was taught the more classical ‘ideal’ point of view on the structure of rings in school. I’m curious if [and why] you regard the annihilator point of view as possibly more fecund?

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 1 Jul 2025 11:11 UTC
10 points
2
on: Paradigms for computation
Nice post Cole.
I think I’m sympathetic to your overall point. That said, I am less pessimistic than you that Neural Network computation can never be understood beyond the macroscopic level ′ what does it do’ .
The Turing machine paradigm is just one out of many paradigms to understand computation. It would be a mistake to be too pessimistic based on just the failure of the ur-classical TM paradigm.
Computational learning theory’s bounds are vacuous for realistic machine learning. I would guess, and I say this as a nonexpert, that this is chiefly due to
(i) a general immaturity of the field of computational complexity, i.e. most of the field is conjectures, it’s hard to prove much about time complexity even if we’re quite confident the statements are likely true
(ii) computational learning theory grew out of classical learning theory and has not fully incorporated the lessons of singular learning theory. Much of the field is working in the wrong ‘worst-case/pessimistic’ framework when they should be thinking in terms of Bayesian inference & simplicity/degeneracy bias. Additionally, there is perhaps too much focus on exact discrete bounds when instead one should be thinking in terms of smooth relaxation and geometry of loss landscapes.
That said, I agree with you that the big questions are currently largely open.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 30 Jun 2025 23:06 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
https://youtu.be/tgkP0W7OvMc?si=hoa0l2mu5B6aRbpy
Perhaps of interest, 16:33 the guy mentions the development of a new type of drone resistant “turtle” tank

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 29 Jun 2025 17:47 UTC
100 points
7
on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
Highly recommended video on drone development in the Ukraine-Russia war, interview with a Russian private military drone developer.
some key takeaways
- Drones now account for >70% of kills on the battlefields.
- There are few to none effective counters to drones. The on
  - Electronic jamming is a rare exception but drones carrying 5-15km fiber optic cables are immune to jamming. In the future AI-controlled drones will be immune to jamming.
  - ‘Laser is currently a joke. It works in theory, not in practice. Western demonstrations at expos are always in ideal conditions. ’ but he also says that both Russia and Ukraine are actively working on the technology and he thinks it could be an effective weapon.
  - Nets can be effective but fiber-optic drones can fly very low and not lose connection are increasingly used to slip under the nets.
  - Soldiers are increasingly opting for bikes instead of vehicles as the latter don’t offer much protection to drones.
- The big elephant in the room: AI drones.
  - It seems like the obvious next step—why hasn’t it happened yet?
  - ‘at Western military expos everybody is talking AI-controlled drones. This is nonsense of course’ Apparently the limitation is that it’s currently too expensive to run AI locally on a drone but this is rapidly changing with new nVidea chips. He expects chips to become small and cheap soon enough that AI drones will appear soon.
  - There is a line of ‘Vampire’ drones that are autonomous and deadly but use older pre-programmed tactics instead of modern AI
- One of the most lethal tactics is drone mining: let a drone lie in wait somewhere in the bushes until a human or vehicle passes by.
  - This tactic was pioneered by the Ukranians. ” Early on, soldiers would try to scavenge fallen drones… then Boom” .
- Western drones are trash compared to Ukranian and Russian forces
  - Swishblade, Phoenix Ghost and a consortium of Boeing designed drones are ineffective, fragile and wildly overpriced. Apparently, the Ukranians have stopped using Western drones opting to focus solely on domestically produced variants.
  - The only western weapon the Russian drone dev was impressed by is Starlink.
    Apparently, Starlink is the reason Ukraine has been succesful with its naval drones. ‘we have the boats, we just don’t have Starlink’
  - One point of optimism: ” you know what’s the difference between Russian and American military exercises? In the Russian exercises Russia always wins, in the American ones NATO occasionally loses.′
- The Russian drone dev admits Ukraine is ahead of Russia in drone innovation, mostly due to their ecosystem of private enterprise drone manufacturers outpacing slow government run Russian military contractors—but the difference is small and Russia is only a couple month behind.
  - For instance, at Kursk, Russian forces massively deployed the fiber-optic jammer-resistant drones surprising Ukranian forces.
- ″ At the start of the war a 1000 drones was a lot. Now a single assembly line can produce 40,000 drones a month”
  - A quick Google states that Ukraine produces about 4000 FPV drones a day. Alarmingly, the same Google search revealed that the total procurement of FPV drones at this moment by the British army is 450 FPV drones! Western militaries are completely asleep at the wheel.
  - ′ The drones we produce today are slapped together. The first thing that will happen after this war is over is that drones will be redesigned from the ground up’
- China
  - Electronic components forming the drones come predominantly from China. China officially prohibits export of weapons to Russia-Ukraine war but unofficially condones the large-scale smuggling of material across the Chinese-Russian border.
  - China is producing their own variants of the Ukrainian and Russian drones, apparently much faster than the West.
  - ′ Chinese chips are only a little worse than Western chips but a ten to hundred times cheaper’
  - ′ Chinese has nearly caught up with the West technologically, maybe half a step behind’
  - Chinese manufacturing and technological prowess is strong but they produce their military material like toys—they don’t have the on-hands experience that Russia [and Ukraine] has.-