Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

Karma: 5,891

″ (...) 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 15 Sep 2025 13:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: MakoYass’s Shortform
I wonder what the evidence is that politicians trading on legislative decisions is very harmful.
It seems distasteful to be sure. A moral failure. But how bad is it really?

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 15 Sep 2025 13:44 UTC
6 points
8
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: adamzerner’s Shortform
>> Anecdotally I feel like there are a fair amount of examples of people who have kids and end up regretting it, at least to a meaningful degree.

The social desirability bias against saying one regrets having kids is very intense. So although I would very much not say that the following observation is anything but a highly biased sample: I personally have never met a person regretting having children in real life. I’ve heard parents complain for sure—true regrets seem to be rare.

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 13 Sep 2025 10:32 UTC
27 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
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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
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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.