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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 - Less Wrong
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New ligament discovered in the human knee as a result of surgeons trying to figure out why some people didn't recover fully after knee injuries.
I'm tempted to deduce "Keep paying attention, you never know what might have been missed"-- I really would have expected that all the ligaments had been discovered a long time ago.
Another conclusion might be "Try to solve real problems, you're more likely to find out something new that way than by just poking around."
Does someone have the medical knowledge to explain how this is possible? My layperson guess is that once cut up a knee, you can more or less see all the macroscopic structures. Did they just think it was unimportant?
Someone who seemed a bit better informed
And that comment is answered by:
Which is interesting-- sometimes studying things in extreme detail "just because" (probably because the object of study has high status-- consider early observations of the planets) can pay off big.
The "new ligament discovered" angle gets less impressive (to me, at least) when I read this part:
I'm more impressed, actually, in terms of the unevenness of progress - it took ~134 years to confirm his postulate? It's not like corpses were unavailable for dissection in 1879.
It inspires more awe at our collective failures, but suggests that we should not be so impressed with the new people as if they had a method that would make us sure that we hadn't missed even more ligaments.