Richard Horvath

• Richard Horvath 8 Jun 2026 19:36 UTC

  3 points

  1

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

  religion is not the true solution to these problems, but rather the hacky patch that kind of helps—you no longer fear death because you know heaven awaits you, everything is meaningful because god, and you can connect with other people over believing in god—but in exchange you contort and utterly trash your epistemics, foreclose the possibility of solving these problems with a more epistemically sane solution (because tearing out this foundation will temporarily thrown you into epistemic chaos), and even if you somehow compartmentalize the epistemic distortions to religion related questions, you still become constitutionally incapable of thinking sanely about ideas like radical life extension.

  I don’t think this is necessarily true. There are some very well educated and knowledgeable people who do believe in such things but their epistemics otherwise seem to be unaffected. Currently we have no radical life extension technologies, but what we do have seem to be still used by most religious people. Yeah, there are some who rather die than receive blood transfusion, but on the other hand the pope himself receives top notch medical care, and so do most religious people who can afford it. Most people never learned that “beliefs should pay rent”, and a lot of their weird spiritual beliefs are more of an “idle wheel … can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism” (semi-paraphrasing Wittgenstein).

  An anecdotal experience I have on this is when a spiritual person described how she multiple times foresaw things in her dreams that came to be later. When I started proposing questions on how she acted on those or proposing test/​benefits that could be done in such a case she was utterly surprised, never having considered that spiritual experiences can be used for anything other than talking about them.

  I think that is the case for most religious people. Going to church won’t stop them from replacing their organs with cloned ones and reprogramming cells to slow aging. They will still say are prayer and thank god for it.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Satur­day June 20, 2pm, Champs Sziget

• Richard Horvath 27 May 2026 9:45 UTC

  0 points

  0

  on: Con­tra Went­worth on Phys­i­cal At­trac­tive­ness for Men

  First, when a woman finds you physically attractive, she doesn’t like you yet, she just finds you hot. And as per the data above, her next move is not usually to make eye contact, it’s to gather more information somehow. In many cases, she’s observing you, trying to decide if she’s going to signal overtly or not. Whatever she’s looking for… is she going to see it? You’re going to have to attend to that, and some of the best ways to attend to it are by being pleasantly social in ways that, to John, suck ass.

  I think this is pretty different from the options that John classified as “suck ass”. The issue with those is doing things that are high cost just to get to the same point:

  • Spending large amount of time at activities not because you are intrinsically interested in them but because it increases the exposure to women.

  • Spending a lot of time cold approaching and developing a level of “woo” that makes women interested in you.

  Note that even after those, the women will still only be at the information gathering step, so the same basic personal qualities are required anyway. However, one can do it on his own terms, without targetedly changing his hobbies or dealing with the psychological cost of cold approaches.

• Richard Horvath 21 May 2026 15:13 UTC

  13 points

  2

  on: Women should be able to open things

  Let me formulate a new question:

  What is the reason for jars requiring such force?

  a. Conscious engineering decision to maximize the probability of preservation with a deliberate cutoff around ~50% of the population. (E.g. when testing the engineers coming up with the design were male and created something they could still open)

  b. The most economical way of producing such preserved food by chance happens to require this amount of force. We ended up doing this as about 50% of the population can still open it. In an alternative universe with weaker male hands we would not have such storage as it would be unusable.

  If the answer is “a.”, this should be much easier to change than in case of “b.”.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Satur­day May 16, 2pm, Tim’s place

• Richard Horvath 19 Apr 2026 20:46 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: There are only four skills: de­sign, tech­ni­cal, man­age­ment and physical

  I think this might slightly break down on higher echelons of larger organizations with deeper hierarchy levels. The general logic of carrier progression in such places follows this pattern:

  1. You start doing the grunt work (e.g, junior developer or analyst).

  2. You gain enough expertise to be able to juggle mental models of the workflow easily.

  3. You can now jump up on the higher hierarchy level (e.g. senior dev, manager, project manager), where you coordinate work of people doing the grunt work.

  4. Repeat #2 for this level

  5. Repeat #3 for this level

  6. End so on until the top.

  The single 1->3 cycle is probably what you can teach in your proposed timeframe of couple of months, but each level in the hierarchy might take the same (in line with the “do not delegate something you cannot perform” principle) . So training someone to be the head of the a large organization, such as an Army General or a CEO might take multiple years.

  This theory is probably incomplete and might be a special case of a broader, better theory just like the already mentioned mathematician case by Jay Baily earlier.

• Richard Horvath 15 Apr 2026 12:07 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Bu­dapest, Hun­gary—ACX Spring Schel­ling 2026

  In case of rain, we are going to hold the meetup in the California Coffee Company nearby.

• Richard Horvath 2 Apr 2026 11:41 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: An­thropic’s Pause is the Most Ex­pen­sive Alarm in Cor­po­rate His­tory [Fic­tion]

  The posted timestamp shows local time, so this showed up to me as if posted on the 2nd of April. I actually thought it was genuine until I got to the “A joint statement was issued by five nations...” section, lol. I might learn about such an event on LW for the first time, but by the time a joint statement could be coordinated I would have been flooded about this from other sources.

• Richard Horvath 1 Apr 2026 22:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Less­wrong Liberated

  LessWrong the book

  Old school book on a wooden table, inkwell, pen, candle.

• Richard Horvath 1 Apr 2026 20:38 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Less­wrong Liberated

  Sith themed

  Dark and red, imperial geometry, lightsaber glows.

• Richard Horvath 22 Mar 2026 19:38 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: Notic­ing a Teacher’s Pass­word Pattern

  I comparable password-pattern I noticed: Options that are clearly longest or most difficult to spell are more likely to be the correct answer for multiple choice type questions (and conversely: Options that are short and easy to spell compared to others are less likely to be correct).

  My reasoning is that people tend to spend less energy on less important things, hence won’t take as much effort (time and focus to spell) when creating the bad options.

• Richard Horvath 5 Mar 2026 12:58 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Game Rec­og­nizes Game

  I think this fits in well with/​potentially explain Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon article from John. One of my hypotheses there also proposed banter being a selection/​discovery process. This game theory perspective seem to point to the same but with way more detailed and deeper explanation.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Satur­day March 21, 1 pm at Tim’s

• Richard Horvath 24 Feb 2026 11:04 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform

  Yes, I think they are. For example:

  • Senator Rand Paul and representative Don Bacon directly opposed Trump on tariffs even though both being republicans

  • The Economist magazine did the same and even more generally (being openly classical liberal)

  • Bloggers/​intellectuals such as Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Richard Hanania and Nassim Taleb are openly against these again

  • The econ department of George Mason university has been consistently anti-tariff before and after Trump

• Richard Horvath 24 Feb 2026 9:40 UTC

  24 points

  11

  in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform

  I think you might be over-updating from your original post. You had a lot of somewhat unrelated and potentially politically sensitive statements (ethnonationalism, IQ, managerial class, ethics, government debt, taboos, egalitarianism, AI stuff). Even if one agrees with the majority of your points, it is tempting to agreement-downvote due to the minority, especially as they have high valency due to sensitive nature.

• Richard Horvath 23 Feb 2026 17:50 UTC

  12 points

  4

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform

  The relationship of “Christianity → Christians” is entirely different from the relationship of “Liberal capitalism → Big companies” or even “Liberal capitalism → Capitalists (meaning rich people who own a lot of capital)”.

  The first is the connection between an idea and people who (claim to) share that idea. The second one is an idea and entities or people who visibly benefit from the system (*supposedly) based on that idea. However, even if they benefit from it there is no strict necessity for them to share the idea itself. In fact, as their wealth is generally concentrated in (a) particular sector(s) they are better off lobbying for special measures (e.g. subsidies, tariffs, preventing entry of competitors) that benefit their market position. This is actually what we see, e.g. Nvidia lobbying to be able to export their chips to China, Apple getting tarriff exemptions and so on.

  The primary economic idea of liberal capitalism is that competition creates the most economic value, and thus elements decreasing that competition should be as few as possible, which is often the opposite of what a particular capitalist or corporation would want for itself. This is also what we see if we look at champions of the idea, who tend to be academics and intellectuals historically, rather than capitalists. In addition, if a capitalist or corporation would fight openly against all tariffs, being successful would benefit everyone equally, but failing and becoming the target of the vindictive administration would only hurt them in particular.

  So we should expect academics and other public intellectuals to be the champions of liberalism, as it is very difficult to create legislation where they are the primary focus of benefits or harms without a bunch of unrelated people being equally affected.

  *”Supposedly” as they themselves might not share the idea that their success is due to the system but may think it comes from some other factor (e.g. their own skills) independent from it

• Richard Horvath 17 Feb 2026 12:00 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Stone Age Billion­aire Can’t Words Good

  Whether it’s possible to remodel the code from 1. to 2. without “engine stopping running” is an empirical question about the slipperiness of this particular slope works. Your proclamation that it can’t be done isn’t actually an argument.

  Following through to the logical conclusion of the general sentiment would stop the “engine”. Although one could probably come up with some economic/​econometric model with an optimal way of taxation for effectively redistributing higher wealth concentration while still keeping wealth generation mostly intact, that is not what people usually ask for. “Billionaire” is not a specific value, it is just the current stand-in word for the outgroup. The actual pointer is to “people who have so much money I consider them to be different from my kind”. If we would just go back 50 years, when household median income was below 10 000 USD a year and property values even more depreciated, redistributing the fortune of millionaires’ fortune would seem as reasonable as billionaires’ is today.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Sun­day Fe­bru­ary 22, 1 pm at Tim’s

• Richard Horvath 23 Jan 2026 8:47 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: Does Pen­tagon Pizza The­ory Work?

  I wonder if this may have been true a (couple of) decade(s) ago, when ordering food was less common and there were fewer pizza alternatives. It is possible that Pentagon guys indeed order more food at such events, but nowadays baseline is so high that it does not bump stats meaningfully.

  “However, a Pentagon spokesperson has denied this, telling Newsweek, “There are many pizza options available inside the Pentagon, also sushi, sandwiches, donuts, coffee, etc.””
  In my experience food vendors within office buildings close by the end of official work hours and if you work late you have to order from outside.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Sun­day Jan­uary 18th 2 pm at Sirius Teahouse