Richard Horvath

• Richard Horvath 8 Dec 2025 9:12 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: why amer­ica can’t build ships

  “Yet, Japanese wages are (on a per-hour basis) much lower than US ones, and I think that’s largely because the management culture is overall even worse than in America. (And partly because of some large-scale embezzlement from Japanese corporations involving corrupt contracts to private companies, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)”—this is the first time I hear about this. Could you please share some information regarding why you think this is the case?

ACX/​LW Meetup: Satur­day De­cem­ber 13, 1 pm at Tim’s

• Richard Horvath 1 Dec 2025 15:41 UTC

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: 10 Apho­risms from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘴

  You could build an app that blocks scammers or a service that connects scammed people and pursues class action lawsuit to help them. You could also scam scammers themselves. You can recognize before other people that a company is a scam instead of the productive business it pretends to be and get rich by shorting it or gain fame and influence by proving it to the rest of the world.

  I think the general message of the quote is that if one believes that they see the world much more accurately than (almost) anyone else, and yet they do not use this supposedly superior knowledge to make their own life better, they are actually not smart, but losers shifting blame.

• Richard Horvath 28 Nov 2025 10:05 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: Post­mod­ernism for STEM Types: A Clear-Lan­guage Guide to Con­flict Theory

  At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:

  -If rationalists want to address the social and epistemic issues postmodernism highlights (power, context, narrative, knowledge construction), they may need a stripped-down, formal version of postmodernism—just as decision-theory formalizations reduce existentialism to operational decision rules, at a cost.

  -One of postmodernism’s central concerns is making sense of power, coercion, and violence—especially sexual violence—at a level of psychological and social realism that allows actual prediction and explanation. Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR handled these themes in a way that anyone with an understanding of postmodern analysis of power was filtered out from the community.

  I agree with the first point.

  The second point might be technically off: A lot of people do not come via TWC and HPMOR, and more importantly, people can acquire the understanding of postmodernism later. It is true though that LW is very mistake-theory focused and selects out (most) conflict theorist. This does not mean there are no rat or rat adjacent conflict theorists. However there is some selection effect pushing out those who are “pro postmodernism” but not those who are against it, even though both are conflict theorists: as mainstream ideas are (were?) primarily influenced/​supported by pro postmodernists, mistake theory rats argued against them due to these ideas not reflecting reality. These are in turn used as ammunition/​safe place for conservative/​anti postmodern conflict theorists. In my experience (via meetups/​forums), most rats are indeed cooperative mistake theorists, irrespective of whether they are left (e.g. EA types) or right (e.g. libertarians), but the very few conflict theorists seemed to be of the conservative kind. This is also a possible explanation why Vance is the most politically successful rat adjacent figure.

• Richard Horvath 27 Nov 2025 14:42 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  I am myself thoroughly confused on this point (and for what its worth, a lot of our experience seem to overlap), but I can provide some competing hypotheses:

  1. Some kind of a selection effect: Banter is not the cause of sex, but is a way to discover whether the other person is open for a hook-up. People not into casual sex (either generally or at that particular instance or with the particular person) will produce different responses.

     1. People with similar reference points will recognize each other and the mutual intent and escalate via physicality or discussing logistics/​intent openly.

     2. It allows non-interested people to be selected out covertly. This is an important feature as it seems some people feel violated if they receive a (semi) direct inquiry about being interested in hooking up.

     3. Due to different cultures/​expectations, people often misidentify the response (typical mind fallacy), which downstream causes things like accidental harassment and the “OMG, I just realized 2 years ago that girls wanted to sleep with me”.

  2. It may be an alternative way to increase the hornyness of the other person if physicality such as dance is not an option.

  3. Whatever the solution is, the effect may be highly (sub)culture dependent. This is compatible with #1, the point being that your local culture may have specific procedure and signs that are very reliable, but in different groups they may lead you astray. For example, if you have a lot of prior experience showing that hours of banter in a generic college study group does not get you laid, but two minutes of chit-chat in a Fetish party does, you will be thoroughly confused and will not escalate when the latter happens again, as in your experience that is just not how it works.

• Richard Horvath 21 Nov 2025 8:52 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: One King Upon The Chessboard

  Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/​fail/​adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/​society may be traded away for it.

  (I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)

• Richard Horvath 5 Nov 2025 21:38 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform

  Why? Do you mean that cis women use height only to filter out males that are shorter than them?

  If so, I do not think that is the case. Statistics from dating apps (e.g. https://​​x.com/​​TheRabbitHole84/​​status/​​1684629709001490432/​​photo/​​1 ) and anecdotal evidence suggest over 50% of American women filter out man below 6 feet in dating apps/​​sites even though only 1% of American women are 6 feet or taller.

  This and the different distribution of ratings (https://​​shorturl.at/​​EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.

• Richard Horvath 5 Nov 2025 15:18 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform

  Because “tall” is context dependent. In Laos the average male height is 163 cm (5″4). In the Netherlands it is 184 cm (6 ft). If your height is 180 cm, you are very tall in Laos, but below average in the Netherlands.

ACX/​LW Meetup: Satur­day Novem­ber 15, 1 pm at Tim’s

• Richard Horvath 23 Oct 2025 11:40 UTC

  22 points

  3

  in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: EU ex­plained in 10 minutes

  “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.”

  The concept of nation state is already guilty of this all. The smallest legislature is your city/​town/​village council, followed by county, and in some cases even a regional legislature-like body. A nation state already takes most of the legislative rights from these and dilutes your votes with millions of other citizens.

  Before nation states were invented in the 19th century*, afaik most European laws were actually pretty much locally made and enforced by the feudal lord or town council of the territory. It is feels unfathomable today, but back than a lot of towns had basically the same level of sovereignty as countries do now.

  *Technically it started eroding earlier with kings trying to centralize power, but in a lot of places still was mostly intact until incorporation into nation states.

• Richard Horvath 16 Oct 2025 11:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: How I Be­came a 5x Eng­ineer with Claude Code

  How likely do you think this quality aspect to stay there long-term? Are you able to allocate more time to quality due to having been sped up on the “core” part of development, but expectations haven’t been increased accordingly? When organizations realize they can push out more productivity, speed of development timeline might be forced to increase and quality may drop back to current levels.

  Alternatively, do you think paying/​preventing technical debt is quicker with LLM assistance than otherwise? I mean as relative cost compared to building out the specific features.

  By the way, what IDE are you using with Claude?

• Richard Horvath 10 Oct 2025 13:33 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: bfinn’s Shortform

  I am pretty sure there are honest and well-meaning financial advisors too. E.g. there are valid and professional blogs/​youtube channels (e.g. “The Plain Bagel”). There are some confounding factors though, in particular, pretty much anyone can call himself a financial advisor. Even if they do not know anything about finance and their only goal is to sell overpriced insurance policies.

Bu­dapest—ACX Mee­tups Every­where Fall 2025

• Richard Horvath 15 Sep 2025 13:07 UTC

  7 points

  4

  on: The Cul­ture Novels as a Dystopia

  “Essentially, the Culture must have value lock-in for the values of the Minds that were present at its founding.”

  Probably at least some value lock-in is somewhat required, unless you want the particular civilization to fracture. If it is allowed to create your own cult of space nazis intent on exterminating everyone else, your post scarcity utopia may not live long. Even “live and let live” is a value, and many people do not subscribe to it.

  “But I think it is more likely that it was achieved by genetic changes, so that it’s safe to raise full Culture citizens in other cultures”

  I agree, or at least that genetic change is also a strong contributor. However, if you think about sociopathy as a disability that in most cases makes one’s and their fellows life worse, this genetic modification is a good thing.

  “In other words, these superhuman minds have not solved alignment”

  I think they did kinda solve it, as long as the other system is somewhat dumber than they are. Just as we are able to more-or-less align dumb systems, probably Minds can do that too. As long as they are not another mind or comparable level.

  I think it really is a somewhat large disempowerment to humanity, but I see this as a better alternative. It might sound great to make all the important decisions, but in the end, humans are just too limited and we would likely fail and ruin ourselves. A Culture where humans make the final decision could not have won the Idiran War. If I am to play chess against Kasparov and my life depends on it, I would much rather let Stockfish make the decisions.

• Richard Horvath 15 Aug 2025 7:31 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Euro­pean Links (15.08.25)

  It sounds so weird I must be missing something. Any idea from someone what is the chain of thought behind it?

ACX/​LessWrong Bu­dapest Meetup July 27

• Richard Horvath 30 Jun 2025 10:20 UTC

  12 points

  0

  in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexan­der Gietelink Ol­den­z­iel’s Shortform

  Adding context/​(kind-of) counter argument from reddit (the link has a link to the main article and contains a summary of it):

  https://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​CredibleDefense/​​comments/​​1ll7ypj/​​article_i_fought_in_ukraine_and_heres_why_fpv/​​

  I think the comments are also worth a read. I want to share one particular comment here, which I think has a good explanation/​hypothesis regarding the situation:

  The scaling up of FPV drones for the Ukrainians was definitely the result of artillery and mortar ammo shortages. But that can’t be the only answer, as Russia never suffered that degree of shortage and they’ve gone as hardcore into FPV drones, if not more so, than the Ukrainians.

  I think the biggest problem relying on artillery and mortars in THIS war is the ultra static nature of it. With the lines barely moving, it’s very hard to create an artillery or mortar firing position that has decent survivability. Enemy recon drones, which can’t be jammed or shot down easily (as most use freq hopping, fly at altitude, have limited radar signatures, etc), they are prowling the tactical rear areas. Since the start of the war, indirect fire has had to greatly disperse, especially artillery, which operates as single guns now. They can’t even do “shoot and scoot” for survivability, since moving is where most of them will be caught. And if they fire, then counterbattery radars will detect their location. What most are doing is having to dig into treelines, at the least using maximum camouflage, if not building overhead cover, making it much more difficult to take them out with counterbattery.

  However, there is only a certain number of hiding spots they can do that. I heard a report last fall about how the Russians in the Pokrovsk sector, despite having ample artillery ammo, had their fire rates drop, because as they were advancing, their artillery could not find and occupy enough hidden firing points to adequately support ground operations. It will be just as hard with mortars, if not harder, because even more enemy recon drones (including those belonging to the enemy’s small unit level) can reach into their range to see.

  Whereas, drone operators are much harder to perform the equivalent of counterbattery, especially destructive (actually hitting them). While artillery and mortars are next to impossible to stop once they’re airborne, for drones its often the opposite, it’s not even worth trying to go after the drone operators, they’re too hard to kill, whereas its much easier to try to down the drone using EW especially, or using some sort of passive system, like C-UAS cage. Or active systems, to include dudes armed with shotguns, other drones, or even hard kill remote gun systems that the Ukrainians and Russians haven’t developed/​fielded much of.

  I’m personally convinced that the ultra static nature of the Russo-Ukraine War is mostly responsible for most of these novel TTPs. And why a lot of this isn’t applicable outside Ukraine.

June 29th Meetup—Muzeum kert

• Richard Horvath 12 Jun 2025 17:08 UTC

  4 points

  −2

  on: Be­ware Gen­eral Claims about “Gen­er­al­iz­able Rea­son­ing Ca­pa­bil­ities” (of Modern AI Sys­tems)

  Thank you for putting in the effort required to review this. Post like this help a lot in interpreting hyped literature. I am also skeptical myself whether LLMs are the path to AGI, and likely would have counted the paper as an additional (small) datapoint in favour of my conclusion if not for your detailed summary (I did not read the original paper myself and had no intention to, hence only ‘small’ data point).

  “There’s a common assumption in many LLM critiques that reasoning ability is binary: either you have it, or you don’t.”

  I agree, and would even push it further: I think the crux of the whole issue is our lack of good understanding of the concept space we refer to with words such as “reasoning”, “thinking”, “intelligence” or “agency”.

  I do have a hunch that we have some inherent limitations while trying to use our own “reasoning”/​”intelligence”/​etc to understand this space itself (something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), but I do not have a proof. Than again, maybe not and we will figure it out.

  Whatever the case is, we are not good at it right now. I imagine an analogy for this if we had the same (lack of) understanding for moving around in physical space:

  Car-3.5 is invented, and is being used to carry things from one location to another. Some people claim it cannot “move on its own”, as Car-3.5 could not move over hill #1 or muddy field #1, so it is just a road following engine, not a general artificial mover. Car-4 is created, with stronger engine, being able to climb over hill #1, Car-o1 has better transmission and wheels, being able to cross muddy field #1. It still cannot cross hill #2 or creek #1, so some people claim again, that it cannot actually move on its own. Other people show that just increasing engine power and doing tricks like adjusting wheel structure will help overcome this, and even most humans would be unable to cross hill #2 or creek #1, we would just go along the roads and use the tunnel or bridge to cross these, just as Car-o1 does it. Are we not general movers after all either? Do we need to increase only engine power and get some scaffolding in place for creek crossing to get a something that can move at least as well as a human in all spaces?

  Replace the “Car-” string with “Humanoid_robot-”, and think about it again. Change back to “Car-” but imagine this is the thought process of a horse, and think about it again.

  We do not know which of the three variant describes our situation best.

• Richard Horvath 29 May 2025 15:05 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform

  Well, the disturbed protagonists in the Culture series (as in: books, and in the whole of the fictional universe) are usually not from the “Culture” (one particular civilizations within the whole fictional universe), but outsiders hired to act as agents.