Negative numbers were popularized in Europe by Michael Stifel's 1544 book Arithmetica Integra, where he called them "numeri absurdi." The concept emerged gradually, as mathematicians found they were useful for solving equations as a kind of "notional convenience," even though they did not think they were real in a Platonic sense.
The same book contains an extraordinary number of nascent mathematical ideas. For example, he talks about "circular numbers," which today we would call modulo arithmetic. He gives a method of multiplication involving a cross that gives rise to our modern "X" symbol for multiplication, but was the first to use algebraic juxtaposition (simply putting two letters next to each other to denote multiplication) and the concept of an "exponent:" `E = mc^2` would look a lot different without Stifel's work!
The most amazing thing in the book, in my opinion, is the extraordinary connection between arithmetic progression and geometric progression he mentions in an almost offhand way[1] (link goes to the Internet Archive version of the book.)
Here, he is using his new negative number notation and exponent concepts together to illustrate that there is some deep connection between addition and multiplication. As far as we know, this was the first mention of the concept that led Napier to invent the logarithm.
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book.
We are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
This hasn’t been true for me. Not only are the majority of software engineers I know married but also looking at the marriage rates in high-income in the Bay Area, it’s quite high, so I don’t think it’s specific to my group.
There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.
It sounds like you are describing a problem with the San Francisco dating scene, which does relate to a small subset of the SWE experience, but hardly covers anything close to the totality of being an SWE.
Is it just possible that your dating problems come from somewhere else? I personally haven't experienced the negative social consequences you're describing, but I'm also not dating in SF.
Well, I certainly was not trying to 'gaslight' you considering I repeatedly anchored my view in "for me" and "engineers I know" and then used a statistic to say that my experience seems pretty standard.
To gaslight you would be to try to convince you that your experience is not what it was. I have no doubt that one's social context determines the outcomes here a lot.
That has not been my experience at all. Usually people aren't interested in the career as a conversation topic ("Oh I don't understand anything about computers! Anyway,") but I've never seen anything like what you're describing.
Maybe AI people specifically get that kind of reaction, but that's a pretty hot topic at the moment.
I haven't found that to be true at all. So I suppose there's a personal component to it and your observation doesn't apply universally? If so, though, that's possibly good news: it means there may be factors that are yours to evolve for better prospects.
There isn’t a word in the comment that I can relate to. Might be a US thing, I’m in Europe.
My [very normal although otherworldly beautiful] wife thinks my job is interesting and talks about me with pride.
When I tell people that I work in IT, they almost never think of FAANG, because these companies aren’t really considered that interesting or important over here. I think it’s uniquely a US thing to conflate “IT” with “SV sociopaths”.
I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of "scratchpad thinking" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little journal apps on my phone. I wrote my own little "microblog" in Django to make it easy to collect and annotate links, quotes, snippets, and images from around the internet. And what I always keep coming back to is plain text files and folders of saved images and files, as well as paper.
For text files, I always have one generic TODO.md file that uses the `[ ]` todo and `[X]` done notation, and a couple of more generic text files like "work.md" or "solace.md" for more free form writing. There are also folders and text files for specific topics, like quotes, poems, etc. It's very important to have a scratchpad that you can just open up and start typing without thinking about how to categorize it, because you might lose the precious thread of the thought while debating which category to use, and you can always shelve it later if it's worth keeping. Zero friction to start typing is crucial.
On paper, I use a simple loose leaf and folder system. I used to use bound journals, but since 80% of what I write down is thrown away, loose leaf works better. Have a pile of about 10-20 pages. You fill up a page, and if it's destined for the circular file, dog-ear it; otherwise give it a title and date and move it to the bottom of the pile. When you run out of blank pages, go through and either discard or file each page in an appropriate manila folder. This works better than index cards (which are too small to contain a complete thought) or journals (where it's too hard to discard pages.) Lots of people use ring or disc bound journals for that, but I find that fiddly and not any easier to work with than loose-leaf, probably because I just keep everything at my desk and don't have to carry it around anywhere.
Paper has a massive advantage when it comes to diagrams, design thinking, and mathematical equations. I love LaTeX, and use MathJax on my personal site quite heavily, but its so much slower and less fluent than just writing equations on paper. I've tried tablets, and am really good at using draw.io (now app.diagrams.net) but when you're thinking freeform you want flexibility and fluency above all else and never want to be fighting a UI, which takes you out of the flow state. Ideas are fragile things, especially when newborn; any distraction is an unacceptable risk.
I used to use a custom Tesseract pipeline to OCR the pages I wanted to be searchable, but lately I've just been using ChatGPT, which seems to do just fine with my handwriting. As OCR got better over the years, I actually moved more towards paper, because what's the downside?
So, getting back to the point of the article: PKM tools are stuck in the unenviable position of competing with both paper and ordinary text files, and for me they just don't offer enough advantages.
I've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case?
Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go and would need a real app to make things any easier; and digiKam might be it.
Interesting - I have no experience with refern.app but my couple month impression of digiKam is that it's quite flexible in terms of tagging and organization. It's also quite fast for my ~20GB collection of photos. It is definitely geared towards photography so many of the utilities (geotagging, camera metadata) might be useless for you.
On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong, I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative.
is not the right way to interpret the null result (insufficient evidence to reject null hypothesis that it has no effect) because the prior for supplements that people are trying to sell you is so low. In the absence of clear, strong evidence, you should assume the the whole thing is just an example of motivated reasoning. People want nootropics to be real, and other people really want to sell you readily available powders by claiming they have nootropic properties. In that environment, they were always going to trying to concoct a similar narrative about some supplement, and it just happened to be creatine. Those efforts were always going to result in a handful of "positive" studies that turn out to be non-reproducible, maybe because of p-hacking, maybe because of publication bias, maybe because of outright fraud. This is what the literature always looks like for stuff that just doesn't work. If it did work - if the effect size was large enough that you could personally detect it in your own life - then the papers would be trying to put error bars around the effect size, not trying (and failing) to barely distinguish it from a placebo.
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” - Ernest Rutherford
I think this is quite different because (1) creatine has been proven to be completely harmless for people of all ages absent some rare thing like a kidney disorder and (2) it has a bunch of clearly measurable positive effects.
So this is more like trying to determine whether ginseng is good at keeping away colds or whatever. Maybe it does (actually quickly searching this, it definitely does but let's pretend it's as folksy as it sounds for a minute) but even if it doesn't then it's harmless and has a bunch of other effects, so when one takes it - the whole possible cold prophylaxis can just be seen as an added perk.
Issue being that if you took everything that's "probably harmless" at once, cramming your body full of supplements, you might just end up harming yourself with substances that are toxic above certain amounts (acute iron toxicity etc.). Also the more random stuff you take, the more likely it is that something you took actually does turn out to have been harmful later.
So no, you should not take something merely because it's "probably harmless".
> So no, you should not take something merely because it's "probably harmless"
You and I should not. But I'm also not going to bother correcting someneone taking homeopathy for a cold. It doesn't do anything. But unless it contains heavy metals, it also isn't hurting.
When I found ivermectin in my father's fridge, on the other hand, I absolutely asked him what he was taking it for. When I confirmed he's also taking real medicine, I dropped it provided he told his doctor in case there are drug interactions. (There aren't. Ivermectin is pretty safe. That's why the nutters congregate around it.)
You are strawmanning what he said. What he said is much better summarized as if a substance has other beneficial effects and there is one that is potentially just placebo, then it is ok. That is completely different than your paraphrase.
Is there a particular rare kidney disorder that creatine is contraindicated for? Because kidney disease is not rare, something like 14% of US adults have kidney disease.
My lay person understanding is that supplemental creatine screws with a common lab test to screen for kidney problems. Let your physician know if you are taking any supplements so they can interpret your lab test results appropriately or order different tests.
I don't know the specifics beyond the fact that your kidneys play a key role in both synthesizing natural creatine and filtering out creatine from your body, and as thus is generally not recommended as a supplement if you have any sort of kidney disorder.
Creatine raises creatinine in kidney function tests. For a healthy person, this isn't a problem, but if you already have high creatinine (from a kidney problem), it makes it harder to interpret test results.
This is basically "wanting" it to be true then it actually being there are so many variables and so many other things that even the minuscule benefit you gain from this heavily marketed science backed supplement could get completely offset by your other lifestyle problem like poor inconsistent sleep. I at one point was deep in this "optimizing" phase listening to all these pseduo-intellectual channels like "What I've Learned" and articles like the one linked and they always overblow the finding to support some conclusion. I tried creatine for full year and didn't felt any different no extra 20% energy nothing still fatigued after work same with fish oils all this stuff is at best either placebo or in case of creatine only tiny benefits that might only be felt by someone really at peak of their training.
The actual things that I now swear by and actually help is consistent sleep of whatever hours that doesn't make you feel sleepy in the day/night (depending on shift) since actual consistency matters more then timing and also in case of workouts really balancing the fatigue to intensity ratio. I understood this late and thought one should always push hard but there needs to be a balance. It's kind of like how cheetah can run really fast but only for 20-30 seconds and then it needs a 30 minute reset period or something. So if you go to failure or always at very high intensity it affects later sets and increases recovery period and in a way driving down overall weekly sets/volume which is main hypertrophy factor.
It’s not completely harmless, for me it causes heart palpitations that are so bad my watch tells me I’m in atrial fibrillation. Yes I know this sounds crazy. I’ve ruled everything else out. No, it is not creatine mixed with caffeine or whatever. Just pure creatine. No, I don’t have any other heart issues. I can give myself an irregular heartbeat just by having some creatine. It doesn’t happen otherwise. I have seen a cardiologist, he said it’s rare but it is theoretically possible.
Scientifically interesting, but it's kind of the same problem whether supplements are dangerous on their own or from contamination. Given how little value an unnecessary medication is it makes no sense to test it to eliminate a risk that is also eliminated by not taking it.
Given creatine is present in several foods, do you have an intolerance to those as well as creatine in supplement form? Curious if it's a simple allergy or the dosage.
Creatine breaks when cooked, so for the most part he's not gonna get too much from eating a steak or whatever. Taking 5g/day of pure creatine to satiate your stores might be too much for this particular individual. Anyway, the parent produces its own creatine as well!
> (2) it has a bunch of clearly measurable positive effects.
Clearly measurably neutrally and scientifically -- or clearly measurable as measured by supplement company funding studies or cherry-picked by health influencers?
and the thing people seem to not understand: how exactly do you _expect_ to be able to notice this change?
Its something that happens after you take it for a prolonged period of time (>7days) and only has a minor/medium effect.
It doesn't make you a genius. I think a better view on it is that it may mitigate some of the adhs symptoms (at least for me).
I can keep on track for a significantly longer time since ive started supplementing with it at ~15g/day - and while i dont feel a difference, i can observe it when actually paying attention to what i do / how often i drift off etc.
What I'm getting from all this is that we have an armchair expert explaining details about something they're not an expert in, and we have you reviewing the way they present this information, saying their very weak hedge wasn't strongly negative enough. Based on priors about the industry.
Basically, HN doing HN things - having a good deep think about topics outside their realm of expertise, then debating the minutiae. I'd just rather trust someone who has spent their career researching this stuff, thanks (unless that's what you do - in which case please tell us more).
"HN doing HN things" over someone saying "good discussion, however, one point about the conclusion" and having that point be very rational and still open to debate.
Is discussing such secondary but still highly relevant aspects verboten? Must every comment here be by a lead researcher in the specific field? Would a biomedical science researcher necessarily have any more expertise on these important secondary aspects?
They're not saying "one point" about the conclusion, they're saying that their statement isn't nearly confident enough, and that they would prefer that they say with strong confidence that there is unequivocally NO positive effect on cognition.
It is a hell of a thing for a random person on an internet forum to be so unilateral, without providing some kind of strong evidence (aside from statements about "the industry", which is kind of beside the point). I would also suggest if you want to be so unequivocal, that the burden of proof is especially high for you.
This "point" isn't actually all that rational - it's knee jerk skepticism. It's a fine default for yourself, but it's not something you get to force on others because they admit there's room for the potential of benefit.
Again: You're perfectly fine to hold that opinion yourself, but when you start trying to force that on others - you now have an especially high bar to reach, and yes - being a lead researcher in the field is exactly what I'm looking for when someone says "X has been proven to not have a benefit for Y".
"Trust me, I'm a scientitian" - Not sure the point of that juvenile wordplay, but Ok: we do have these things called scientists, some are good, some are terrible. You still need to back up your statements - that's the key part, this isn't a blind appeal to authority. And it's a hell of a lot better than "Trust me, I'm a nerd with very strong beliefs about a topic I know very little about".
The top of HN threads is generally nitpicking minutiae which are more likely technically correct than not but also highly irrelevant. It's done by non-experts and drowns out any more valuable discussion.
It'll be people arguing about exact language not being someone's preferred level, or overloading the importance and exact definition of a technical term that experts don't really care about, or blowing up some edge case or another.
It wasn't a point about exact language in and of itself. It was a point about the conclusion, and how it doesn't account for highly relevant aspects of the publication record and industry. This was not "a better word would be" or similar. This was "the meaning was wrong, the thinking was wrong, and here's why".
Exactly my point. You are making an essentially meaningless distinction in attempts to "correct" what I said to be more precise in a way that does not matter at all with regards to what I was trying to say.
My understanding from this exchange is that for you, large distinctions of meaning and reason are reducible and accurately described as meaningless language nitpicks, but regardless, you dress up the last post as if it's the opposite, so I will not respond further.
It may be minutiae, but olooney’s point is valid: the evidence doesn’t seem to support saying “maybe a little”. Remove that statement from the conclusion and it’s on the right track, aside from the arbitrary IQ point calculation which is nonsensical.
Even as an informal conclusion I think it's important to know who you're up against and what their motivations are. Waving that away is how we get people like known, obvious charlatans like RFK Jr in any sort of position of power. I know this is nitpicking word choice but the informal conclusion is "Not likely, and not enough to matter for anything."
With most industries companies live and die by their reputation. Find a bulk provider with a positive reputation and the creatine you buy is almost certainly going to be safer than e.g. eating at Taco Bell. And with creatine in particular it's so dirt cheap that a lot of motivation for dodgy stuff goes away unlike e.g. with protein powders where amino acid spiking can save a company a bunch of money. And incidentally creatine is one of the substances dodgy companies use for amino acid spiking, just because it's so cheap!
That said it's obviously the right decision to drop it if you're not seeing any effects. The interesting thing about creatine is that people's bodies are very different in their natural levels of creatine, and if you're already at 'saturation' then more creatine isn't going to do anything. Same reason the typical benefits of creatine don't show much difference beyond 5g/day. That's enough to send the overwhelming majority of people towards 'saturation.'
There is a brand of creatine manufactured in the US (con-cret) and a brand manufactured in Germany (Creapure). Either of those companies should address the concern around adulterated powder.
> That's why I dropped creatine since I didn't notice any benefits when I tried it for a year.
Some percentage of people (~20%) are creatine non-responders [1]. It's pretty reasonable to try creatine and then drop it if you find no benefit. I personally find the gain very marginal.
You still haven't specified what negative side effects you're referring to. Nitrogen tends to be inert, so I'm questioning your claim that N2 causes some negative side effect, not your claim that creatine hinders this yet-unnamed side effect
What value is there to an informal conclusion when the topic is as important as intelligence? The downsides to creatine if taken without good scientific backing should not be disregarded, yet that’s exactly what many ordinary people are now doing because of “informal conclusions” like this.
Are there really downsides to creatine though? (Genuine question). All the advice I've seen makes it seem like it's basically just good for you even if it doesn't accomplish some specific thing. The only downside I've heard is maybe water retention?
That's not the point. Often in medicine, the downside of using one thing is that you're not using another thing that would be safer and more effective. When people chase results from unproven therapies, often it means they're avoiding doing something else that is known to produce a result - even if the result of the alternative is not as spectacular as the unproven therapy promises to be.
But speaking of creatine itself, while not inherently toxic, consuming large doses can cause serious indirect harms, such as triggering falsely elevated kidney markers on blood tests that lead doctors to misdiagnose organ failure, unnecessarily cancel crucial medical treatments, or order invasive biopsies. Furthermore, overloading the body with creatine while taking kidney-stressing medications (like heavy doses of ibuprofen) or having an undetected renal condition can cause actual acute kidney strain, while the massive shift of water into muscle cells can trigger severe dehydration, heat exhaustion, and electrolyte imbalances during intense heat or exercise if fluid intake falls behind.
But, I don't want to belabour the point about creatine. Rather, I want to focus on the negatives stemming from NOT doing other things that ARE proven to be safe and effective. People tend to think creatine will solve a lot of their problems (for instance, they may believe it will fix their feeling of being "low energy). But by avoiding things that might actually help their problem get better, they're persisting a poor state of health.
Taking creatine does not bar you from doing other things. Being "low energy" is too general a thing, and to approach you probably need to start eliminating factors anyway until you find the issue, by getting better sleep, doing blood tests etc. Taking creatine can be part of this.
Creatine supplementation not having significant effect in X domain in population level does not mean that it will not have effect on YOU if for example you are vegan and don't get enough creatine from diet. If you have low energy, probably you have something that may not show in a population level. Similarly you may be low in B12 and then B12 can help you, but it may not show effects in population level if most of the population is not low in B12 (and your study is not powered enough to catch nuances).
It is not like when you have to choose between two medicines and excluding one can be harmful even if the other is not harmful to take per se. You can supplement creatine and try whatever else at the same time.
The null is surely different in this case because we know that supplemented creatine goes to the brain and the brain uses it, which is definitely not a claim all supplements can make.
The fact that there's a biologically plausible mechanism plus mixed statistical evidence makes "maybe" a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
I think the way you interpret the null result is downstream of considering creatine as "a supplement". You can make the null result say anything by changing your prior about creatine or supplements. That's the issue with priors.
You also seem to reject the possibility that some things help just a bit. The author has another article in the same vein about "things that can help maybe a bit but the evidence we have doesn't really help detecting small effects" https://dynomight.net/vitamin-d/
Heavily agreed. The supplement industry has such a low level of reliability that it has really soured me on so many practices people have. And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
They survive because people want to believe. Look at the history: the phrase “snake oil” exists because people actually sold products by that name as a remedy. There were also tonics based on radium.
The story of how the phrase snake oil came to be is a fascinating one. Clark Stanley, an American, ripped off a Chinese product which was actually a decent anti-inflammatory, and didn't put any snake oil in his snake oil, which is why it didn't work!
Hard sell. I remember the time I went to GNC and they gave me a free sample of the notorious Jack3D which had some kind of amphetamine-like stimulant in it and was associated with young soldiers in the US Army falling down dead.
>And I flat out do not understand how some of the supplement stores survive.
I think mostly through placebo effect, people buy a supplement to treat condition X and they think it's getting better, so they keep buying.
I mean, just look at the wide variety of homeopathic "cures" that are often so diluted that there might not be any molecules of the active ingredient left. Yet people keep buying it.
I was visiting a friend’s lab at NASA Ames the other day. I smiled seeing this on the wall there. I sometimes daydream about what it’d be like if our primary education system devoted an hour a week to reading / discussing comics (well, XKCD specifically), or pages form What If…? Maybe it’d kill the magic of it, but I still feel plenty of seeds would get planted along the way for more critical thinking later in life.
Just the green ones. If they found a link, they found a link
I'm sure that the comic wants to be sarcastic but is missing the mark here. This is how science works. Trying and failing every color except green, does not mean that the green experiment has an invalid result.
The author is not understanding that each experiment is independent.
The correct cartoon should show researchers trying green jellybeans 100 times, with 99 negative results and one positive result, and then the press keeping only the positive (Or in this comic, claiming that all jellybeans produce acne).
Mocking the scientific method, and showing scientists as lazy people that play video-games is funny, but is just a cartoon, not the reality. People should not take XKCD as god's speech without any critical thinking. This in your workplace says to me "I don't really understand statistics".
There is an effect that is statistically rare just by chance, AND is consistently absent within a huge control group of "non-green jellybeans" (the author seems to think that this weakens the result, but in fact is reinforcing it). And it needs further research. Not less, not more.
Munroe didn’t misunderstand the independence of the experiments at all. He understands that misleading spurious results can arise from repeated experiments.
> And it needs further research. Not less, not more.
No it doesn’t. At least not anymore than the other colors. A positive result is no more deserving of further investigation than a negative result. What you are describing is bad science.
This is exactly my point. They are not repeating experiments. Each one is a different one, and independent of the other, because the chemicals in each color are different. The cartoon don't show any data that proves that this is a random correlation, because they are not testing what you think that they are testing. Jellybeans here are irrelevant (They are present in both groups, the control and the experiment). It may be, or not be, a random correlation, we can't know at this point. And this leads us directly to the next line:
> A positive result is no more deserving of further investigation than a negative result.
This is not how science works.
Your null hypothesis is rejected, you publish and continue trying to explain why. Otherwise you stop and try something different.
Films have sold us the idea that science can be done in the countdown of a bomb, experiments take 30 seconds; and if it does not work in the first try, it means that you are not a real genius. The weird guys build a time machine in a weekend with empty cans of soda, and the hackers broke into high security buildings with a paperclip and then remove their glasses and nobody recognizes then anymore. Yeah. Master of disguise. This Big Bird costume pays for itself every time we break into the Pentagon. G'morning Mr Hegseth
But this is a fantasy, not the real life. Scientists stumble and limp all the way. Even the geniuses. Specially the geniuses. And they faint at the price of the required spare part that must be ordered and imported from one, and only one, company in Finland, and will be here in five months. Meanwhile, researchers throw things to the wall to see what sticks, and laser focus on the unexpected strange result that is different in a subtle way, because their grants depend on it.
> This is exactly my point. They are not repeating experiments. Each one is a different one, and independent of the other, because the chemicals in each color are different. They are not testing what you think that they are testing.
They ran the same experiment 20 times with a meaningless variable changed until they got a positive result with a confidence of 95%. (i.e. 1/20 chance of a random positive result.)
The point of the comic is that this is bad science. Or at least it is ver bad science reporting. This kind of nonsense is why there is a multibillion dollar market for supplements that do not hold up to further testing.
"Scientists bad because I don't understand statistics" is boring. Just because you decided that is a meaningless variable does not mean that it is.
P-hacking doesn't mean doing a lot of experiments. This is called working hard or going the extra mile. Working hard is not cheating. That the real scientists would do is frown upon the green jellybean result, think "hum, this is strange" and test further for effects of the green dye in other products. Science knowledge is in-cre-men-tal.
P-hacking is: changing the statistical model that you use to analyze the data, until you find one that gives you the desired (publishable) p-value.
P-hacking is manipulating the methodology in your favor and sometimes grooming the data also. All of that while ignoring other models available known to be more robust, precise and better for your particular case. This is why p-hacking is cheating.
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Second. There are a market for fake supplements because, to express it crudely: people is idiot and the government does not care about them.
1) Some people didn't cared to learn even basic biology at the school, and will believe that the moon is made of cheese if it comes from somebody in their tribal team. Scientists take a lot of pain to assure that their knowledge is available to the public.
There are thousands of scientific articles about creatine. Never has been so easy in the history to find them. And with AI, you don't even need to read the whole horror anymore, to have a general idea of cons and pros before to jump in the water. Do your f*k homework before to gulp a mysterious pill. If not. Don't blame scientists later.
2) The government make laws. Is not scientists fault, if it allows to sell legally dubious supplements, or even more if politicians profit of it, (ehum, mandated testosterone tests for every soldier, ka-ching!).
Their job is to protect citizens from scammers. Most countries ban anything that is remotely medical and not proven effective, or at least advice strongly against taking it.
> "Scientists bad because I don't understand statistics" is boring. Just because you decided that is a meaningless variable does not mean that it is.
It’s literally a comic about how spurious results arise.
I understand what you are trying to get at with your insistence on pedantically misreading the comic, but you’re missing the forest for the trees.
> Your null hypothesis is rejected, you publish and continue trying to explain why.
In this case the “why” is “we ran so many experiments that a false positive was inevitable”.
> Otherwise you stop and try something different.
“Only publish the positive results” is exactly the problem. This is terrible science because it magnifies false positives and hides the negatives (false or not). Do enough experiments and eventually you get a positive result for basically anything.
People have no idea how successful big pharma’s info campaign has been since what I’m increasingly calling the real Web 3.0 (post-influencer social media and arrival of big corporate narratives).
According to Reddit, Epsom salt has no effect (doesn’t absorb) - you’re wasting your time by using it. They’ll cite all sorts of real, funded studies that agree and yet always the comment section is filled with anecdotal evidence of the contrary - to which a typical response is “hot water in general is soothing” (ignoring efficacy of magnesium sulfate in ice baths).
I digress - creatine is a similar situation. All this confusion at best. It’s also not unlike the health effects of cannabis just prior to going effectively legal - it either causes or cures cancer, or something? We need more research! That’s the real problem!
Any time you see this sort of narrative it’s corporate politics and influence at play.
By virtue of how hard it is to get any information on creatine, it probably threatens some market or vertical at least (whether or not it “works”). Like A. muscaria mushroom or sassafras, you’ll have to do your own research to really know.
if there's a strong measurable effect to any of these supplements, why can't it be studied? there are companies on both sides, so someone who sells creatine could fund one if they like.
There is an incredible amount of evidence for creatine being beneficial for making you stronger/muscle growth. Which is probably the primary reason it's sold. So it's not as if it's not studied or there are no known effects of supplements.
> Magnesium? Its widely known that magnesium is used by the body lol
Who disputed this?
> What they “doubt” is that it can be absorbed through the skin
The science is helpful. Magnesium sulfate is absorbed less effectively than magnesium chloride. Of course, you're not eating the amount of Epsom salts one dumps in a bath.
> And it is studied btw - problem is there are countless on both sides
Drinking the same Epsom salt in water that you soak in has the same effect as soaking in hot or cold water with it, and it's also the same effect as taking magnesium supplements sold over the counter.
You can try it yourself - totally safe. You already eat magnesium all the time.
Whatever you're doing with your comment, I'm not convinced.
Reddit is shit tier source for all kinds of information about commercial products. Even subreddits for niche hobbies are full of astroturfed advertising for random online businesses. There is no way the supplement industry isn't doing its own campaign over Reddit and other platforms especially when you consider how large of a market it is.
Okay, but it kind of sounds like you want to nanny-state the writer's language.
Their conclusion seems like an absolutely fair interpretation of what they saw, and it also strikes me as dangerous -- perhaps more dangerous -- to suggest "writer genuinely believes, or doesn't believe, a thing, but they should say it differently from their own interpretation because..people are dumb?" Something like that.
What kind of metaphor? You can be a metaphorical nanny state of something smaller like a household or comment section, I suppose, but even then not with a single statement. The problem with a nanny state is the scope. And people expressing contrary opinions isn't nannying.
One of them used constraint solving with Z3, which was indeed reasonably fast. However, by far the fastest was a simple backtracking solver written in Rust which used bit twiddling to quickly test for intersections. For polyomino's in particular, this represents between 10x and 100x constant speed boost, depending on the size of board. There's no way to get that back with a smarter solver.
> so hopefully you can refresh a few times and get a fresh one every time
If you randomly sample from only 60 quotes, then after 10 refreshes there will be a greater than 50% chance of at least one repeat, and by 20 refreshes it's up to 95%. This is an example of the birthday paradox[1].
On the flip side, if someone wants to see all 60 quotes, they will have to refresh the page an average of 281 times, mostly (~80%) seeing quotes they've already seen before. This is an example of the coupon collector's problem[2].
The way to avoid both these problems is to shuffle the quotes into a random order, just once, and remember that order. The first time a user comes to the page, start at a random index in that shuffled list, and from then on, simply move to the next item in the list. Every user will get a unique set of random quotes, but will see no repeats until the list is exhausted, and will be guaranteed to be able to see all available content in just 60 refreshes.
If the user doesn't know how many unique items there are, they would need to keep refreshing even longer to gauge whether the N they've seen is the full set.
Is there a good way to determine after seeing N unique items in M trials how many items there potentially are? Would tracking the time between seeing new unique items help? Is this an already solved problem?
There are many different statistical estimators for this problem, many from the ecology literature (e.g. Chao1). This paper and a Python library based on it covers many of them:
No, it's not the same as the German tank problem, because that assumes all sampled values are unique (and totally ordered). It's closer to the "species richness" estimation problem, where you estimate the total number of species from a sample (specimens) with many repeated values (species).
