All of Samuel Hapák's Comments + Replies

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 ... (read more)

Nonsense. The fact that you can see some vague parallels between phlogiston and electrons or energy doesn’t make phlogiston theory any good. The fact that you can’t decide whether phlogiston represents electrons or energy should be a hint here.

Scientific theory should give useful predictions about the world and help us compress information. Phlogiston one does neither.

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.

The line between good and bad is thin. This technique can be and often is misused for manipulation. The white-hat use of this technique is to make the other person stop and think.

Of course, my rewrite was a hyperbole;)

But you are right about value subjectivity. “I feel” are an amazing technique to deescalate conflicts and built rapport. You cannot disagree with my feelings! That’s quite powerful.

I agree with you these are useful in dialogues whether in person or in comments section.

I don’t believe they (usually) have a place in books or blogposts. Those are not situations requiring conflict deescalation. The “I think” is filler because it is implied. Of course the author writes what he thinks.

You are taking this to the extreme. The goal is to make text succinct, to get rid of fillers. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make likelihood statements when warranted, just don’t start every sentence with agnostic “maybe”, or “I think”.

I think you might be taking this to the extreme. I guess that the goal might be to make text succinct, or maybe to get rid of fillers. I would probably say that it doesn’t mean that you can’t make likelihood statements when warranted, but it might be better to not to start every sentence with agnostic “maybe”, or “I think”.

Agreed. Hitler was total amateur. Commies killed much more people and actually managed to terrorize people for almost a century.

The following two points are contradicting each other:

1. In theory at least, Georgism is correct that a land tax will not cause rents to rise.
2. Land will become cheaper to buy, and there will be more pressure to use it in an economically viable way.

I believe the 2nd is correct, whereas the first one isn't. The extra pressure will result in real rents rising. If the land is under-utilised today (e.g., empty, or a garden where nice big house could stand) the maximum possible rent is not being charged. Possible reason might be that the current land-lord can't make... (read more)

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 ?

It’s more than that, there is no uncertainty about probabilities in the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) and yet, there can be a conflict.

You might want to fight even if it’s more expensive than compromising, because you are playing a repeated game. You don’t want to send a signal that you are a kind of person who compromises with an aggressor.

Few quick examples:

Why is it “out of curiosity” and not “out of the curiosity”?

Why “see in context” and not “see in the context”? (See the button below this form)

Why “hide previous comment” and not “hide the previous comment”? (See the button above this form)

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.

Five days is too short, but if the judge instead said you'll die in the next month and it will be a complete surprise for you, it would be easy to execute.

Algorithm is simple, every day an executioner throws a coin. If it's heads, prisoner lives for another day. If it's tails, prisoner dies that day. By having 50% chance to live, if the prisoner is taken to be executed, it is a surprise for him. Now the only problem is, if by some small chance a tails wouldn't fall in the stipulated timeframe. In the original problem, chances of that are 1/32. Pretty small, but non-zero. However, for 30 days it's 10^-9, which is small enough to be pretty damn sure that the judgement will be fulfilled.

Nate Silver's predictions were changing too much over the time. If those probabilities were legit, you'd be able to sell binary options based on them. If Nate would do that, he'd went bankrupt, because he created lot of arbitrage opportunities.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.06351.pdf

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 hou

Most of people believe in an existence of the world around us. When I say existence, I don't mean existence in a mathematical sense such as "there exists ε > 0", I mean existence as something "real", "fundamental".

On the other hand, the very same people believe there is nothing such as "soul, qualia, god, call it whatever you like it". I find that strange, because every single argument against existence of soul can be used against existence of the physical world around us.

Take this one for example:

"Of c... (read more)

Something is missing in this explanation. Why isn’t everyone super rich?

It's a huge difference whether the reviewer is some anonymous person unrelated to the journal or whether it's an editor in chief of the journal itself. I don't think it's appropriate to call the latter peer-review (there are no "peers" involved), but that's not important.

Editor in chief has a strong motivation to have a good quality journal. If he rejects a good article, it's his loss. On the contrary, anonymous peer have stronger motivation to use this as an opportunity to promote (get cited) his own research than t... (read more)

Royal Society in 1660 and current academia are very different beasts. For example the current citations/journal’s game is pretty new phenomenon. Peer-review wasn’t really a thing 100 years ago. Neither complex grant applications.

Academia in the current form isn’t Lindy. It’s not like we’re doing this thousands of years. Current system of Academia is at most 70 years old.

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?

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.

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.

Yeah, I think you're right. There are two types of explanations:

• those which compress information
• those which provides us with faster algorithms to reason about the world

The three-body systems is the example of the latter. As is lots of math and computer 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.

True, but that’s usually very artificial context. Often when someone claims they know the probabilities accurately enough, they are mistaken or lying.

There is one other explanations for the results of those experiments.

In a real world, it's quite uncommon that somebody tells you exact probabilities—no you need to infer them from the situation around you. And we the people, we pretty much suck at assigning numeric values to probabilities. When I say 99%, it probably means something like 90%. When I say 90%, I'd guess 70% corresponds to that.

But that doesn't mean that people behave irrationally. If you view the proposed scenarios through the described lens, it's more like:

a) Certainty ... (read more)

And what about this argument:

As the civilisation progresses, it becomes increasingly cheaper to destroy the world to the point where any lunatic can do so. It might be so that physical laws make it much harder to protect against destruction than actually destroy—this actually seems to be the case with nuclear weapons.

Certainly, currently there are at least 1 in million people in this world who would choose to destroy it all if they could.

It might be so that we achieve this level of knowledge before we make it to travel across solar systems.

Very simple. To prove it for arbitrary number of values, you just need to prove that h_i being true increases its expected “probability to be assigned” after measurement for each i.

If you define T as h_i and F as NOT h_i, you just reduced the problem to two values version.

There is actually much easier and intuitive proof.

For simplicity, let's assume H takes only two values T(true) and F(false).

Now, let's assume that God know that H = T, but observer (me) doesn't know it. If I now make measurement of some dependent variable D with value d_i, I'all either:

1. Update my probability of T upwards if d_i is more probable under T than in general.

2. Update my probability of T downwards if d_i is less probable under T than in general.

3. Don't change my probability of T at all if d_is is same as in general.

(In... (read more)