wedrifid comments on The Correct Contrarian Cluster - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 December 2009 10:01PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 23 December 2009 08:49:53AM 6 points [-]

I think that the sailing-faster-than-the-wind or the directly-downwind-faster-than-the-wind (DDFTTW) problems would make for a very interesting contrarian-cluster question, as it has a few features that don't often coincide in one controversy:

  • Many ordinary people claim that sailing downwind faster than the wind actually works in practice, not merely in theory.
  • This claim appears to have the form of "I don't need to check the details of your perpetual motion machine, I know right off the bat that it can't work!" It seems blindingly obvious that some principle of physics ought to prevent DDFTTW from working.
  • The amateur Youtube video for the DDFTTW machine is a very low-status means of demonstration (i.e. it's just what a crank or faker would do).
  • However, several of the smartest and most skeptical minds who did the actual computations have averred that the folk wisdom is right, and the "obvious" physics principle is mistaken in its application here!

Just having considered these data points (I haven't worked through Tao's or MarkCC's analyses), I assign very high probability (>99%) to sailing-faster-than-the-wind and DDFTTW working as described.

I expect Robin and Eliezer to agree with this assessment (and, though I expect them both to have updated in the same fashion, I suspect that Robin would have updated faster and with less effort than Eliezer in this instance— though on other types of problems I'd expect the opposite.)

Comment author: wedrifid 23 December 2009 10:05:12AM 1 point [-]

However, several of the smartest and most skeptical minds who did the actual computations have averred that the folk wisdom is right, and the "obvious" physics principle is mistaken in its application here!

I put the 'folk wisdom' on the side of "you can't go DDFTTW" here. It doesn't seem obvious from the perspective of physics but perhaps it does from the perspective of 'common sense'.