ChristianKl comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: arundelo 05 February 2013 10:20PM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 02 February 2013 02:26:07PM 4 points [-]

32 people in the same ten block radius simultaneously dying of malfunctioning pacemakers seems so tremendously unlikely, I can't imagine how one could even locate that as an explanation in a matter of seconds.

Comment author: jsbennett86 02 February 2013 10:57:46PM 3 points [-]

Also from the review:

A pacemaker malfunction isn't automatically fatal. In most cases the patient's heart will still beat, although with an abnormal rhythm. The severity of a pacemaker problem depends on the type of malfunction as well as the severity of the patient's condition. EM interference can cause problems, but major problems are rare considering the amount of EM interference pacemaker patients are exposed to. Pacemakers are designed to minimize these problems. It's hard to believe that dozens of pacemaker patients with various heart conditions and different makes and models of pacemakers would simultaneously die from microwave exposure.

Comment author: HalMorris 03 February 2013 04:53:06PM 1 point [-]

Unless the 32 people used the same, or very similar, pacemakers, and somebody forgot to say that.

Comment author: Desrtopa 04 February 2013 04:56:41PM 3 points [-]

Still sounds extremely unlikely. If a model of car has a particular design flaw, you'll expect to hear a lot of reports of that model suffering the same malfunction, but you wouldn't expect to hear that dozens of units within a certain radius suffered the same malfunction simultaneously. You'd need to subject them all to some sort of outside interference at the same time for that sort of occurrence to be plausible, and an event of that scale ought to leave evidence beyond its effect on all the pacemakers in the vicinity.

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