>If you were given the choice of two different dangerous roads where one road had a 30% lower chance of getting into a life-threatening car crash, you would probably think that the choice was obvious, not that the two roads were basically the same.
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.
The OP is not claiming that the link is being changed; the complaint is that a hyperlink is being generated from the plaintext URL. The HTML body of the email is being modified.
If you run a restaurant and a known dine-and-dasher walks in, can you not refuse to serve them?
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?
Known dine-and-dasher - no, I think you should be forced to serve them. You don't know if they're going to dine and dash you, you're not the police or the courts, punishing a dine and dasher. Your job is to serve food to those who pay you. If you've got a problem, make them pay for food first?
Consultant - unless you've got a legitimate need to reject providing services to them, I tend to think the same, you should have to serve them if they're trying to pay you, or there's a legitimate business need to avoid that client.
Transport company - it's not your job to judge what's being moved. It's your job to move something from A to B. If you want to avoid moving livestock, don't go into the transport business. Should that same vegan be allowed to not teach kids in school because the kids they teach eat ham sandwiches? Should they be allowed to reject someone from banking services just because they own a fur coat?
These all sound wild and like their impeding on all kinds of freedoms - you’re saying that a business should be compelled to serve or work with anyone that offers to pay them which is _wild_.
The issue comes down to when you refuse to work with someone because of an immutable property - race, gender, age, etc - denying someone from coming into your restaurant because they’ve ripped you off is completely fine and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. This smacks of “freedom of speech” when people get mad that a private platform told them they couldn’t say mean things.
This response is indicative of a completely different perspective on the idea of "argument" (and "making up your mind," a phrase that does not appear in the than the original article and would not fit with the framework of understanding expressed therein). The belief that your mind should or even can be "settled" on an issue - that you can examine the evidence, weigh it, judge it, come to a definitive conclusion, and then never think about it again - is not universal.
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.
> "making up your mind," a phrase that does not appear in the than the original article and would not fit with the framework of understanding expressed therein
While it does not explicitly appear, a mind cannot be changed if it was never made. Change, by definition, requires something to already exist.
> revisiting the same issues over and over again as new evidence is brought up
in these arguments.
Right. But they can't change their mind as they never established something that can be changed. This is the state before a mind is made. It is possible that a mind will never be made. For complex subjects, it is unlikely that a mind can be made.
I have no mind formed when it comes to anything related to politics. I'm not sure how anyone reasonably could. There is so much information, and even more information not accessible, that making a mind is completely beyond grasp. If one thinks they have, I suspect they are out to lunch. Perhaps confusing their state with tribalism or some such similar quality.
The fact that most people seem to enjoy a good political argument now and again solidifies the idea that they don't actually have a mind made. People lose interest in arguments once they've settled. Argument occurs in the state where one is unsure. It is how humans explore and learn about the world they don't yet understand.
You realize that examples can extend to other topics?
"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.
Your original issue with the article was that once you've "settled" an issue, there is no reason to argue about it. I pointed out that a number of people do not "settle" issues in the way that you describe, and that argument serves to update their information and beliefs constantly.
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.
> By definition, any update of beliefs is changing one's mind. My mind changes often...
So would you say changing one's mind is a case where one seeks a different religion (where beliefs are thrown around freely)?
I can't imagine believing in something unless it is essentially irrefutable (e.g. 1+1=2). And where I have beliefs, I'm not going to argue them. What purpose would that serve? I have already established the utmost possible confidence in that belief for it become one. I have no remaining compulsion to keep trying to see what more can be learned when I am certain there is nothing more to learn. To continue to want to learn more about something you are certain can be learned about no more must be the definition of insanity.
If we want to lean on definitions, the dictionary is equally clear that a belief hinges on acceptance. "I am 60% confident that recursion is the best method for this algorithm." means that I don't know. "I don't know" is not a state of acceptance. That is not a belief.
>So would you say changing one's mind is a case where one seeks a different religion
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.
> "I don't know" is absolutely a state of acceptance.
Yes, it absolutely is acceptance that you don't know. It is belief in not knowing. But that's not what we were talking about. Context must be considered.
> Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact...
Curious choice. The GCIDE is not among the usual 'authoritative' dictionaries, and for good reason. It takes its definitions from a publication written in 1913. It is not a modern dictionary. Unless you've invented a time machine... It is interesting from a licensing perspective, but little more.
Of course you are absolutely right that anyone can make up a random definition for a word on the spot. They can even publish it in a book if they so choose. But you know that wasn't what you were talking about when you brought up "definition" and you know that didn't change going forward. Context must be considered.
> The second way this argument is flawed is that dictionaries are descriptive tools, not prescriptive.
Hence the poking fun of your "By definition, any update of beliefs is changing one's mind." comment. It even prefaced with "_If_ we want to lean on definitions" to highlight that it could not be taken in a serious way. Did you not read the thread in full before landing here? Context must be considered.
I, for one, thought the discussion we were having was rather interesting. I have no idea why you thought anyone would want to read this blatantly obvious, horribly off-topic slop.
One thing the Streisand effect illuminates is a certain type of person is not fully able to model the consequences of trying to keep information secret. It's absolutely plausible that someone in the university administration actually believed that they could tell the FBI "please keep this secret in order to protect our reputation" and that their request would outweight the agency's other duties. There exist people that are that self-important.
>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?
In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.
The Hindenburg was one of only two passenger airships, so imagine if 50% of passenger aircraft eventually crashed. There was also no obvious route towards making them safer at the time. Even if the problem of flammability could be solved, they were very vulnerable to bad weather and it was still decades before modern weather forecasting.
Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.
ZR-1 through ZR-5.
The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.
Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.
I like the airship idea over ocean ships because land doesn't get in the way. I imagine a ring of airships encircling the globe based on the prevailing winds. Except bigger, like a handful of sky cities (hydrogen being abundant, the square-cube law being what it is).
So instead of shipping something from the other side of the planet, you can just wait a few weeks until the warehouse is overhead, and burn a lot less fuel overall.
Or maybe you're having a conference in one. Either take a plane there and have your conference in the sky, taking the slow way back. Or get on when it's overhead and take a plane back (or if you're really patient, take the long way around the planet). The change of scenery would be much better than just flying to Vegas all the time.
New York City to (near) London is almost certainly the most common route by ship and it really isn't that many people in the scheme of things. I couldn't imagine having gone to my boss and telling them I'd spend a week getting to London for an event and spend 4x or whatever the amount. You can also get New York to Hamburg or a shortish train trip from Paris. And business passengers are most of the (especially premium) travel volume on those general routes. (And that doesn't even take into account far less frequent liner schedules.)
I don't dispute that, if you take budgets out of the equation, we could probably make corporate events more exclusive and more fun, but that's not really the way things are.
I think what that commenter meant, and I agree, is that the "savant" in this case was referring to a literal computer; the programmer as an IC is "delegating" a task by writing a program and having the computer execute it.
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.