Readit NewsLikewise, if a casino or betting company (ladbrokes, for example) have customers that win too often, I also think it should be illegal to stop them betting. Fundamentally if you're running a business that is an uneven coin toss (to your favour) and you have customers that are able to make money off you - that's your fault for having a bad business model.
So to answer your question, any size.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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?
ApoB is shaping up to be an incremental improvement in measurements, but health and fitness influencers have taken the marginal improvement and turned it into a hot topic to talk about.
This happens with everything in fitness: To remain topical and relevant, you always need to be taking about the newest, most cutting edge advances. If it’s contrarian or it makes you feel more informed than your doctor, it’s a perfect topic to adopt for podcasts and social media content.
ApoB is good, but it’s not necessarily the night and day difference or some radical medical advancement that obsoletes LDL-C. For practical purposes, measuring LDL-C is good enough for most people to get a general idea of the direction of their CVD risk. The influencers like to talk about edge cases where LDL-C is low but then ApoB comes along and reveals a hidden risk, but as even this article shows there isn’t even consensus about where the risk levels are for ApoB right now. A lot of the influencers are using alternative thresholds for ApoB that come from different sources.
> In the end statins reduce the chance of heart attack by like 30% I think. Not bad, but if you have a heart attack without statins, you probably (70%) would have had a heart attack with statins too. That's what a 30% risk reduction means, right?
30% reduction in a life threatening issue is huge. I don’t see why you would want to diminish that.
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.