The "Well Informed" column is a weekly series of very short articles (half a page, or even just a column) on health issues. You can hardly expect a very deep dive.
> Nope. There's barely even an article there, and it just makes a giant sweeping generalization
The article mentions both RCTs that show the benefit, as well as long-term observational studies that show the disadvantages of sugar substitutes, and furthermore clarifies that "proving causality through such observational studies is difficult". That strikes me as fairly nuanced.
> English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it.
> Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
> Will they not go? — No, they will not.
> Will they go? — Yea, they will.
> Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
So, this has obviously simplified. But what I find interesting is that English speakers from the Philippines or from a Russian background chose differently (where SME is standard modern English, and PRE is Philippine/"Russian" English):
Will they not go? — SME: Yes, they will. PRE: No, they will. [Not sure about that one.]
Will they not go? — SME: No, they will not. PRE: Yes, they will not. [I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers.]
Will they go? — SME/PRE: Yes, they will.
Will they go? — SME/PRE: No, they will not.
ETA from Wikipedia :-)
> In December 1993, a witness in a court in Stirlingshire, Scotland, answered "aye" to confirm he was the person summoned, but was told by a sheriff judge that he must answer either yes or no, or else be held in contempt of court. When asked if he understood, he replied "aye" again, and was imprisoned for 90 minutes for contempt of court. On his release he said, "I genuinely thought I was answering him."
Indeed. It seems like system 1 and 2 could fail identically, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are all correct, and as described the wrong answer from 1 and 2 would be chosen (with a "25% majority"??).
Though here the consensus algorithm seems totally different from Paxos/Raft. Rather it's a binary tree, where every non-leaf node compares the (non-silent) inputs from the leaf, and if they're different, it falls silent, else propagates the (identical) results up. Or something something.
Very neat, but 1) is not really P(customer wants to run their own firmware), but P(customer wants to run their own firmware on their own device).
So, the first term in 1) and 2) are NOT the same, and it is quite conceivable that the probability of 2) is indeed higher than the one in 1) (which your pseudo-statistical argument aimed to refute, unsuccessfully).
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl???
Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
> Nope. There's barely even an article there, and it just makes a giant sweeping generalization
The article mentions both RCTs that show the benefit, as well as long-term observational studies that show the disadvantages of sugar substitutes, and furthermore clarifies that "proving causality through such observational studies is difficult". That strikes me as fairly nuanced.
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