Samuel Hapák

Karma: 200

Samuel Hapák 24 Jun 2019 20:59 UTC
18 points
on: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
Something is missing in this explanation. Why isn’t everyone super rich?

Samuel Hapák 11 Jun 2019 19:56 UTC
17 points
on: No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you
Very nice. Few notes:
1. Wrong incentives are no excuse for bad behaviour, they should rather quit their jobs than engaging in one.
2. World isn’t black or white, sometimes there is a gray zone where you contribute enough to be net+, while cut some corners to get your contribution accepted.
3. People tend to overestimate their contribution and underestimate the impact of their behaviour, so 2. is quite dangerous.
4. In an environment with sufficiently strong wrong incentives, the only result is that only those with weak morals survive. Natural selection.
5. There is lot of truth in Taleb’s position that research should not be a source of your income, rather a hobby.
What links here?
- John_Maxwell's comment on Debrief: “cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics” by Milan_Griffes (EA Forum; 15 Jul 2019 5:31 UTC; 24 points)

Samuel Hapák 25 Dec 2022 22:55 UTC
15 points
16
on: YCombinator fraud rates
I would be careful to discern between fraud and police state allegations of fraud. Aaron Swartz is clearly the latter and it at least deserves to be mentioned in the article.

Samuel Hapák 12 Oct 2020 13:44 UTC
13 points
on: Housing Hubris
You make few wrong assumptions here:
1. Rent is much cheaper than mortgage. I don’t know about your country, but where I live mortgage is cheaper than rent. People actually buy flats, rent them out, pay mortgage out of rent income and even make small cash on top of it.
2. Comparing house to farmland is not fair. I can start comparing house to having kitchen utensils. Most of the people I know still cook their own food instead of ordering deliveries. And most of the people I know buy cars instead of renting them.
3. When you rent, you don’t have a control over your house. You would like to get new kitchen? Well, your landlord has different idea. So what, you gonna move out? Every stupid thing you want changed, you don’t really can.
4. Lastly, it’s a hedge. If you buy house to get wealthy, that might not be best idea. But if you buy it, because you want to live long term somewhere, then mortgage is a way to get “guaranteed rent”. No need to worry that because of some stupid market bubble, suddenly your rent will skyrocket.

Samuel Hapák 26 Jan 2023 23:26 UTC
12 points
6
in reply to: Lycaos King’s comment on: Some Thoughts on AI Art
Actually you got it backwards. The so called intellectual property doesn’t have typical attributes of property:

– exclusivity: if I take it from you, you don’t have it anymore

– enforceability: it’s not trivial to even find out my “art was stolen”

– independence: I can violate your IP by accident even if I never seen any of your works (typical for patents), this can’t happen with proper property

– clear definition: you usually don’t need courts to decide whether I actually took your car or not.

Besides that, IP is in direct conflict with proper property rights (right to use your own property freely).

However, having IP is a practical way of overcoming the black passenger problem. But that’s the reason it was created in the first place. That’s the reason it actually expires after some time and works become a part of “public domain”. (Can you imagine a car becoming a part of public domain? See the difference?)

Now, even the US constitution is aware of this and explicitly states “progress of science and arts” as the only lawful reason to enact copyright.

[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Samuel Hapák 15 Jun 2019 22:08 UTC
11 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you
Is it necessary so? Today science means you spend considerable portion of your time doing bullshit instead of actual research. Wouldn’t you be in a much better position doing quality research if you’re earning good salary, saving a big portion of it, and doing science as a hobby?

Samuel Hapák 1 Mar 2024 19:19 UTC
10 points
5
on: The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum—Part 1
I guess the didn’t have their programming class yet😂

If you wrote a C program and it doesn’t do what you predicted, would you assume that your compiler is broken or that you made a mistake? If I got a dollar for every time someone wrongly complained that “there is a bug in compiler”…

World is complex. We use theory to build models describing the reality and compare their predictions with experiment. If you notice mismatch between model and experiment, it might be a problem with:
1. Your experiment.
2. Your model.
3. Or your theory.
You have to further dissect and understand the root cause of the mismatch before you make any judgement.

Samuel Hapák 21 Dec 2023 21:59 UTC
10 points
8
on: Pseudonymity and Accusations
I would say that the norm should be:

— If someone is building pure online persona, it isn’t appropriate to dox them because of their online activities. There essentially is no added value for society in doing this. The person is using pseudonym to freely communicate their views and opinions while protecting their day-to-day life.

— Once anyone starts to bring real physical life into the conversation (such as your example) they are becoming a fair game. It’s them who linked their online presence to real life, they doxxed themselves.

I would say, if you want to stay anonymous, you should show at least some effort in trying to protect your identity.

Samuel Hapák 19 Feb 2024 12:00 UTC
9 points
9
on: Weighing reputational and moral consequences of leaving Russia or staying
Run away while you still can. Yeah, it’s scary. And heartbreaking. But you might not have that opportunity later on.

Take everyone with you whom you can.

You don’t have to run to some extremely different country/culture. There is lots of relatively wealthy Slavic countries in the Central Europe.

And talented programmers can always find job here.

Let me know if you need help with that.

Samuel Hapák 27 Dec 2023 19:39 UTC
9 points
6
on: In Defense of Epistemic Empathy
Thank you for writing this.

I always felt lots of empathy to all the people in my out-group^[1]. Yeah, they believe to a bunch of wrong ideas for dubious reasons. So? My in-group usually believes a bunch of right ideas for similarly dubious reasons! They have no moral high-ground to claim the truth. Often, the out-group has better ideas to believe what they do than my in-group despite being wrong about the end result.
I actually think that it’s worse when people are right for the wrong reasons than if they are wrong. In the latter case, there is at least a chance that reality will slap them into face eventually.
1. ^
  Out-group here is strongly topic dependent. Pretty much for every topic the in-group and out-group looks different to me.

Samuel Hapák 24 Apr 2022 18:12 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Dustin’s comment on: What Is a Major Chord?
The thing here is, that ancient people discovered that notes which have frequencies in a ratio of small integers sound good together. Eg. 2:3.

For a long time, people were creating scales trying to have as many nice ratios as possible. This has problems. I’ll let you think about those yourself.

Then some guy figured out that human ear is not perfect and we can’t really tell whether we hear 2:3 or 2:2.9966. And came up with idea of doing those 12th rootes of 2.

Now, try to do 2^(7/12). Try also 2^(4/12). You see ?

Samuel Hapák 29 Dec 2023 15:06 UTC
7 points
on: Boltzmann brain’s conditional probability
I understand your post as trying to argue that Boltzmann hypothesis is more probable than the Boltzmann brain because our subjective experiences are consistent with physical laws.

If that’s the case, your conclusions are wrong. Boltzmann brain is still more probable in this scenario. The mistake you make is excluding the 3rd option that the reality we experience is objective for some other reason (a reason we might not understand yet).

Now, your post is a good argument in favor of 3rd option and against both Boltzmann brain and Boltzmann hypothesis.

Samuel Hapák 14 Oct 2023 10:46 UTC
7 points
−6
on: Is the Wave non-disparagement thingy okay?
I am honestly confused with why everyone considers non-disparaging agreements bad in all contexts.

People often end up hating each other, eg sometimes bad break-ups happen. I do think that “I am not going to bad-mouth you, you’re not going to bad-mouth me” is a sensible fair thing to do that allows people a) move on with their lives without a fear of retaliation, b) allows more honest relationships when they work because you don’t have to be constantly collecting “evidence” for potential future defense?

And, the same way this makes sense in relationships, I see it making sense in employer-employee relationship?

Samuel Hapák 2 Jun 2019 20:46 UTC
7 points
on: On alien science
Good property of scientific theory is that it serves as a data compression. Les bits you need to explain the world around you, the better theory. This is IMO very good definition of what explanation is.

Also, the compression usually is lossy, such as Newtonian mechanics.

Samuel Hapák 20 Jan 2022 22:26 UTC
6 points
on: Too right to write
I am not a native speaker. Funnily, I don’t do the kind of mistakes you mention, there are other much more counterintuitive aspects of the language for me:
1. Capitalisation. That the century should be lowercase is obvious, but why is “English language” with the capital E? And why March with the capital M? Those are not proper nouns either.
2. Commas. I would expect more people to have a problem with commas than with a phenomenon vs phenomena.
3. Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.

Samuel Hapák 12 Jun 2019 22:27 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you
Some important things can be a source of income, such as farming. Farming is pretty important and there are no huge issues with farmers doing it for profit.
Problems happen when there is a huge disconnect between the value and reward. This happens in a basic research a lot, because researchers don’t have any direct customers.

Arguably, in a basic research, you principally can’t have any customers. Your customers are future researchers that will build on top of your research. They would be able to decide whether your work was valuable or whether it was crap, but you’d be pretty old or dead by that time.

Samuel Hapák 16 Nov 2023 15:08 UTC
5 points
4
on: Kids or No kids

If it seems weird to spend hours deliberating and negotiating over an Excel sheet with your partner, consider how weird it is not to do that—you are making a decision that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and is binding for years; if you made this type of decisions at work without running any numbers, you’d be out of a job and likely in court pretty quickly.

I am making decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without running any numbers pretty often at work.

They haven’t fired me yet.

Samuel Hapák 15 Oct 2023 23:10 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: How can the world handle the HAMAS situation?
My understanding is that Jews were ¹⁄₃ of the total population, not 20%.
I agree though that the UN plan for Palestine was too generous to Israel, but that might have also be caused by Arab side essentially sabotaging it and not engaging in negotiations?
And the actual outcome for Israel turned out to be even more than the original UN plan was suggesting. Still, I don’t know how a good solution would look like here. Jews were the underdog here and if they wouldn’t secure the territory they secured, it would probably get pretty bloody bad for them. Simply, them having some smaller territory that wouldn’t really be defensible doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium to me. Also, it’s not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today’s population). I don’t think there would be any Jews alive today would the roles be reversed.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not me trying to absolve them of the war crimes they did, nor me trying to say that it’s fair that they pretty much got most of the land while Arab’s live an an Apartheid state occupied by Israel.
I am just saying that I don’t think that there was some magic easy solution back in 1948 that would lead to magically better situation than there is today.
FYI: This is the proposal from 1937 rejected by Arabs that would have been IMO fair according to population criteria. I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.

Samuel Hapák 15 Oct 2023 21:59 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: How can the world handle the HAMAS situation?
I am not saying that displacing 700,000 people was okay. I am saying is that splitting the region between two people who were already living there was right. Especially given that these two people could not be realistically capable co-governing together given their not-so-great relationship.
But you are changing argument on the go. First, you start by saying it’s not ok to come to someone else’s land and steal it (100% agreement on that). Then you pretend that somehow there were not living Jews in Palestine (they were already). They had as much right for the land as all the muslims that lived there.

Samuel Hapák 14 Oct 2023 21:37 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: How can the world handle the HAMAS situation?
I think you are working under a wrong assumption that there was something as Palestine where Palestinians lived.

The reality was that there was an Ottoman Empire, they lost in a WW1, and thus they lost this region to British. There lived Jews and Muslims there, though there were more Muslims than Jews. It happened to go under the name of “Palestine region”, but thats similar like saying “What did those Czechs and Slovaks thought settling in the Hungary and carving out a portion of the country? Didn’t they notice that there were Hungarians living for like a thousand of years already?