MondSemmel

Karma: 4,308

MondSemmel 30 Oct 2025 14:55 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
I’m not convinced by this response (incidentally here I’ve found a LW post making a similar claim). If your only justification for “is move X best” is “because I’ve tried all others”, that doesn’t exactly seem like usefully accumulated knowledge. You can’t generalize from it, for one thing.
And for philosophy, if we’re still only on the level of endless arguments and counterarguments, that doesn’t seem like useful philosophical progress at all, certainly not something a human or AI should use as a basis for further deductions or decisions.
What’s an example of useful existing knowledge we’ve accumulated that we can’t in retrospect verify far more easily than we acquired it?

MondSemmel 30 Oct 2025 14:11 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
An AI answer to a philosophical question has a possible problem we haven’t had to face before: what if we’re too dumb to understand it? [...] What if AI comes up with a conclusion for which even the smartest human can’t understand the arguments or experiments or whatever new method the AI developed? If other AIs agree with the conclusion, I think we will have no choice but to go along. But that marks the end of philosophy as a human activity.
One caveat here is that regardless of the field, verifying that an answer is correct should be far easier than coming up with that correct answer, so in principle that still leaves a lot of room for human-understandable progress by AIs in pretty much all fields. It doesn’t necessarily leave a lot of time, though, if that kind of progress requires a superhuman AI in the first place.

MondSemmel 26 Oct 2025 9:29 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform
A statement of “we won’t do X” is just words. By themselves, they don’t make for a trustworthy commitment or promise, certainly not something a human or AI should plan actions around that relate to their very survival.

MondSemmel 23 Oct 2025 13:00 UTC
17 points
3
in reply to: Raphael Roche’s comment on: EU explained in 10 minutes
If you’re going to assign the blame for the world wars to nationalism, why not also assign the credit for positive things to nationalism? Like the industrial revolution (courtesy of the British Empire), the success of the United States (and in particular its successful war of independence against Britain) and so on? Putting the suffering and damages caused by two World Wars on one side of the scale is indeed a tall order to overcome, but if much of the rest of modern history is put on the other side of the scale, that can easily outweigh them.
Regarding cosmopolitanism, I think the backlash to cosmopolitan immigration policy in all Western countries is a good example to illustrate the shortcomings of this worldview. There’s a certain perspective that praises immigration on the grounds of democracy and openheartedness, but stops listening as soon as their own voters are against it. For instance, the rise of the AfD party in Germany occurred due to this: historically I’ve only been familiar with leftist parties splitting up due to ideological differences, but when the dominant conservative CDU party embraced immigration, lots of conservative voters understandably viewed that as a betrayal and thus moved to a further-right party. Personally in such situations I blame the actions of the moderate parties more than the voters who moved to the more extreme parties.
As for the EU project, I’m not opposed to it in principle. But the strategy of gradually enlarging and growing the project over time was bound to result in increasing resistance and backlash. And it’s furthermore incompatible with the notion that you need to require many decisions to be unanimous for nations to buy into the project in the first place. And it resulted in bizarre design compromises like having a currency union but no fiscal union, which e.g. wrecked Greece after the 2008 financial crisis because it didn’t have a separate currency it could devalue. 17 years later, the country still hasn’t recovered its GDP from that time.

MondSemmel 23 Oct 2025 12:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: EU explained in 10 minutes
That’s an interesting historical perspective, thanks! Though my point was mostly about whether a voter in a European nation in the 20th or 21st century should vote to join, empower, or expand the EU. Whereas citizens in earlier centuries didn’t even have the option to vote against the actions of their governments.

MondSemmel 22 Oct 2025 11:35 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
That “final step” line is fun because one doesn’t need any math background to understand it:
However, it was completely stuck finishing the final step: that since the not-absolute points occur in pairs, there is an even number of them.

MondSemmel 22 Oct 2025 11:28 UTC
27 points
−3
in reply to: Raphael Roche’s comment on: EU explained in 10 minutes
This comment is far too negative on nationalism, and far too positive on the EU based on its concept rather than what it turned out to be in practice. National sovereignty is important! What does democracy even mean when your vote can’t even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn’t share its values? Etc.
It’s all well and good to say that international cooperation is positive and that nationalism is misguided, but international cooperation doesn’t necessarily result in policies you as an individual would like. Besides big-picture items like low economic growth in the EU region, a smaller one that comes to my mind is the occasional push to restrict speech and outlaw encryption on the altar of “think of the children”. That’s not an EU-specific problem, but it is yet another vector by which bureaucrats and politicians try to restrict freedom for some nebulous security reason.
Similarly, I also don’t like the labeling of the two factions as “progressive” and “conservative”, since many politically liberal-minded readers might associate those terms with “good” and “bad”. How about “cosmopolitan” vs. “nationalist” instead?

MondSemmel 21 Oct 2025 12:07 UTC
10 points
3
on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
I share your frustration and anger with how we dealt with the Covid pandemic, and that experience certainly made me a lot more pessimistic about our ability to deal with any other impending disasters like AGI doom.
That said, the first part of your post feels to me like it’s equating “we didn’t fund preparation for this” with “we didn’t learn from this”. I agree with the latter, but there are tons of things our civilization could’ve done that hardly required any funding (in particular, removing regulatory barriers, e.g. to things like human challenge trials), and conversely, we can and do put arbitrarily high amounts of funding into various topics without actually doing much or any good on them.
And separately, to me there’s a far more fundamental lesson from events like Covid than “Humanity learned nothing”: namely that there is no such thing as a ‘Humanity’ that could learn from things and that no-one is in charge. (On LW, this meshes with concepts like Heroic Responsibility and HMPoR’s Nihil Supernum.)
There are occasionally individuals and individual organisations that act with some kind of agency towards some particular purpose, and which sometimes accomplish good things (one I read about was VaccinateCA). But Humanity is not a hive mind, we’re merely the aggregate of a few billion humans, and while we do certainly act with more purpose and direction than the particles in a gas, we don’t ultimately act with that much more purpose. To me it looks more like we’re at the mercy of faster and stronger processes: like the exponential growth of Covid infections, or the seeming inevitability of economic and technological growth.

MondSemmel 21 Oct 2025 11:24 UTC
12 points
2
on: EU explained in 10 minutes
I like this attempt to explain the EU. Though as a EU resident, I still don’t feel like it particularly answers the questions one might ask about it. Questions like:
- How powerful is the EU, relative to other major countries?
  - What is its role in international politics?
  - What is its long-term trajectory, based on key indicators like economic growth or population growth?
- As a resident of the EU, is the existence of the EU a net positive or net negative for me?
- Did the existence of the EU help or hurt in crisis situations like the financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid pandemic of 2020?
- Are all of the questions above even meaningful?
Also, I’m wary of sentences like “this instability gives the Union more wiggle room and the opportunity to try alternative approaches” which assign more agency and coherence to such an entity than seems warranted.

MondSemmel 9 Sep 2025 12:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Immigration to Poland
I found that event online, but not the claim that this was what motivated the shift in policy.

MondSemmel 9 Sep 2025 10:52 UTC
17 points
6
in reply to: ACCount’s comment on: Immigration to Poland
immigration is very good for economic growth
This is certainly true for US-style immigration, where immigrants are higher-skilled and likely to speak English. But surely the effect is comparatively worse for European-style immigration, where immigrants tend to be much poorer, often refugees from religious third-world countries, and have a low chance of speaking the native language. All of which complicates integration and increases anti-immigration sentiment.

MondSemmel 9 Sep 2025 10:45 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Immigration to Poland
If I remember right Merkel’s decision was due to her experience of being asked by a young struggling and fearful refugee whether Merkel thought it was right for her to be deported.
I don’t see why I’d believe any career politician when they claim that a particular one-off event (that seems well-suited for journalistic reports) fundamentally changed their mind about a topic. And in the first place, did she even claim this to be the reason?

MondSemmel 8 Sep 2025 10:27 UTC
23 points
4
on: Immigration to Poland
The attitude of modern parties towards immigration policy is pretty insane. I understand that politicians, being cultural elites, tend to be much more cosmopolitan than the population average. But repeatedly overriding your own constituents’ preferences inevitably invites backlash, and ultimately sets back the very cause you wanted to champion. On this topic, I liked David Frum’s 2019 article, If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.

MondSemmel 27 Aug 2025 7:45 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
Because in this model, kindness to kin evolved because we share a significant fraction of our genes with our close kin (1/2 for children, siblings, and parents; ¹⁄₄ for grandchildren, grandparents, uncles/aunts/nieces/nephews; etc.). If there’s instead an ant queen, then all ants in this particular colony are siblings, but genetic relatedness to other hives is very low. Then you don’t get kindness to kin but something else, like kindness to hive or self-sacrifice for hive.
EDIT: I think the above holds, but the justification in EY’s Twitter thread is different, namely that “Human bands and tribes are the right size for us to need to trade favors with people we’re not related to” but scaled-up ant colonies are not.

MondSemmel 21 Aug 2025 15:24 UTC
4 points
1
on: AI #130: Talking Past The Sale
The weirdest event of the week was America and China both self-sabotaging on chips. America is trying to sell Nvidia H20s to China and looks open to selling the vastly superior B20As to China as well despite this being an obviously crazy thing to do, and China is feeling insulted by Howard Lutnick and telling companies not to buy the H20s and maybe not even the B20As, and even looking into banning using foreign chips for inference.
We truly are in a dumb timeline.

MondSemmel 13 Aug 2025 21:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Towards_Keeperhood’s comment on: LessWrong FAQ
Sites like Reddit and Substack and Youtube all have similar problems. And they’re surely aware of it, but none of them have fixed it. I wonder why?

MondSemmel 3 Aug 2025 12:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
If a powerful antagonist is dumb or shortsighted enough, anyone can kill them, but what stories go out of their way to claim that their Big Bad is dumb? That’s usually the role of side characters or mooks, not of the Big Bad.
Plus it takes a certain kind of survival instinct to survive for 1000 years in the first place.
I agree with the tradeoff of safety vs. convenience, but there are many types of preparation that require a one-off investment, rather than an ongoing inconvenience. Cost, though, should not matter to most antagonists, since they typically far exceed the protagonists’ resources.

MondSemmel 1 Aug 2025 23:21 UTC
21 points
1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
I also criticized HPMOR’s Final Exam at the time, though for reasons of story consistency, rather than narrative.
That said, I don’t think the particular kind of satisfying conclusion you wanted to see works for rationalist fiction like HPMOR. After all, the premise is that all characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, have their own spark of optimization, genre savvy, and so on. So they know how these stories are supposed to go (the Hero wins, the Dark Lord loses, etc.), imagine how they could be defeated, and preempt those scenarios as best they can.
So in a rationalist version of that game finale, the elder vampire takes precautions against having his precious box stolen; protects his coffin from tampering; has overcome his weakness to garlic, or found a workaround (like a gust of wind spell or something), or faked having the weakness in the first place; etc. etc.
The most likely way for a prepared adversary to lose in such a situation is through a surprise, an out-of-sample error. That may not be as narratively satisfying, but it makes a lot more sense than for an elder vampire to die because an average human learned about his weaknesses. As if the vampire wasn’t aware of those weaknesses himself and didn’t have ample time to compensate for them.

MondSemmel 25 Jul 2025 20:58 UTC
50 points
1
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
I made a partial transcript of a WWMoR podcast episode with Eliezer from 2020, which included this part:
I feel like the largest literary flaw [in the story] is that the grand climax of the story is Harry solving what I would later call a Level 2 Intelligent Character puzzle, which is sort of like a Munchkin puzzle. The Final Exam is like ‘Assemble these facts from inside the story and come up with a creative use for them.’, and it’s not a final challenge that holds up the thematic weight of the rest of the book. [...] It’s like a thing of cleverness where the solution doesn’t really have the depth that I learned to write in the rest of the story.
And that was an example of a flaw that just could not be fixed because of the number of open parentheses that had been set up and the amount of foreshadowing done going literally back to the first sentence of the book, pinpointing that exact puzzle and that exact solution. By the time I got there and could sort of see the way in which it wasn’t adequate, the structure of the book was woven together so tightly that there was absolutely no way to change it.

MondSemmel 19 Jul 2025 20:38 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant
Gwern is a very poor counterexample, both because he’s also/primarily an extraordinarily prolific top-level poster (e.g. all of gwern.net), and because he’s such a noncentral example of a commenter. The typical (or average or median or whatever) comment on the Internet, or on LW, is not Gwern-level, so why bring him into this if not to muddy the waters?
Also, the distinction between comments and posts is not arbitrary. Writing top-level posts is much closer to creating, commenting is much closer to critique. No-one would argue that a movie director produces the same kind of value as a movie critic; the same applies to posts vs. comments. Or as another comparison, writing top-level posts is closer to shipping software features (like your work on gwern.net?), while commenting is closer to submitting bug reports, and usually ones that aren’t about critical issues like crashes. Again, both activities have their place, but they’re not at all interchangeable.
Regarding the LW discussion on effort, I am fully aware of it. In my comment I clearly claimed “is hard but has much larger potential upside”, i.e. I’m claiming writing top-level posts produces more value in expectation, and thus just the attempt to do so already deserves some credit. Whereas if a site treats its new creators too harshly, eventually all it’s left with are its critics.
Finally, a meta comment: Your comment here is a good example of what I meant by commenting being easier than making top-level posts: if it had been a top-level post by someone else, and you had read it, I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example. But your comment lacks the very rigor you expect in others.
In fact, if comments and posts are no different, then I dare you to put your words into practice. Make this very topic (or another one like your work on gwern.net) a full post and open it up to the kinds of critique only top-level posts are subject to.