[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12665265/ - Meta analysis results; "after intervention, the Cr group exhibited significant strength gains"

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2748 - "A total of 69 studies with 1937 participants were included for analysis. Creatine plus resistance training produced small but statistically significant improvements... when compared to the placebo."

If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.

That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

> Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: Yes sir. But now that they are doing psy-research, we're gonna have to do psy-research, sir. We can't afford to have the Russian's leading the field in the paranormal.

Source: The Men Who Stare at Goats

You could absolutely think that they were basically the same, depending on the base rate. The differece between a one-in-a-million and 0.7-in-a-million is 30%, but it wouldn't be humanly perceivable. We're all likely faced with situations like that regularly. Differing airlines probably have much greater variances in their crash statistics, but it just doesn't matter in 99.99999% of flights.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45213170

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

If you're a consultant do you have no right to refuse a client? Even if you have other clients you'd rather work for, or that particular client is a bad fit for you, or any other reason?

If you run a transport company, and you think someone is trying to get you to move illegal goods, or goods that you have moral qualms about transporting (such as a vegan being asked to transport livestock for slaughter) do you have no right to refuse?

I have no idea what you mean by this. I explained in detail what changing one's mind entails. It has nothing to do with "irrefutable" or deeply held convictions.

You have a nonstandard definition of belief.

First of all, "I don't know" is absolutely a state of acceptance. It is acceptance that the information is not fully reliable. Most things are unknowable; the vast majority of held beliefs are not arrived at through irrefutable logic but by simple trust in consensus. I believe that certain food is nutritious, even though I have not run tests on it myself. Data might arise later showing my beliefs to be false; that is why I assign probabilities to my beliefs, rather than certainties.

Second of all, your fallback to a dictionary definition is flawed in two ways. The first is that various definitions of "belief" exist; one of which (from https://www.wordnik.com/words/belief) is "Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact, opinion, or assertion as real or true, without immediate personal knowledge; reliance upon word or testimony; partial or full assurance without positive knowledge or absolute certainty; persuasion; conviction; confidence." (emphasis added) Another definition given is "A conviction of the truth of a given proposition or an alleged fact, resting upon grounds insufficient to constitute positive knowledge."

The second way this argument is flawed is that dictionaries are descriptive tools, not prescriptive. That is to say, dictionaries are not arbiters of truth in language but merely reference documents for possible meaning, and where they differ from common usage, it is the dictionary that is incorrect.

You stated that a mind "cannot be changed if it was never made." I disagree; one does not need to have an absolute belief in something to "change their mind." By definition, any update of beliefs is changing one's mind. My mind changes often, but usually by small increments. A key part of that is argumentation; I constantly seek out counterarguments to my own beliefs to see if new data or points of view will sway me. In the absence of that, I argue against myself, to see if I can find flaws in my logic and update accordingly.

By that logic argument, as described by the original article, is extremely useful for ensuring that one's beliefs accurately reflect reality.

To me, your position that an issue must be "settled" in one's mind (whatever that means, because I don't think you're perfectly clear on that) before you can be said to "change your mind" doesn't make sense.

"I am 60% confident that recursion is the best method for this algorithm." "Having had more time to study potential options, I am now 75% confident."

"I am sure that I parked my car here." "Oh, you're right, we were on the east side, not the west."

"I am predicting that I will enjoy the movie tonight." "Given the expressions of people leaving the cinema ahead of me, I am rapidly reconsidering my prediction."

Your objection seems to primarily come from a difference in definition for "changing one's mind" - the way you describe it sounds to me like a fundamental shift in an axiomatic belief, whereas I, and many others, use it simply to indicate that we are updating a probabilistic map.

"I am 70% confident that candidate X will win the upcoming elections."

"Oh, new polling data has come in that shows more support than I previously knew about? I'm now 80% confident of their victory."

Why do you think change cannot occur unless a belief is certain?

There exist people who think probabilistically; issues are not definitively decided in their mind, but given some likelihood of being one way or another. Such people tend to have much more accurate understandings of the world and benefit greatly from constructive debate, revisiting the same issues over and over again as new evidence is brought up in these arguments. If you'd like to know more, I recommend reading the book The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef.

https://www.windowscentral.com/british-government-reported-a... (previously discussed here; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30736887)