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Luke_A_Somers comments on Help us Optimize the Contents of the Sequences eBook - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: lukeprog 19 September 2013 04:31AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 September 2013 03:21:50AM *  7 points [-]

Both. The sequence is technically off on that detail, but someone who knows their stuff should know better than to complain about it. The simplest fix is to just say that this is a special custom half-silvered mirror that has these phase shifts.

I was going to say that the cleanest fix would be to make the math right, but looking at the math, it seems that the real math is so much messier and harder to explain (half-silvered mirrors invert or not based on which side you half-reflected from!) that getting it right would muddy the waters far more than using your power of arbitrary setups to make an idealized apparatus.

Comment author: ciphergoth 20 September 2013 04:01:10PM *  3 points [-]

Motivated reasoning made its masterpiece there - the guy does know his stuff, but he basically found one tiny nit and went "THIS IS CLEARLY ALL BOGUS, AS AN EXPERT I IMPLORE YOU ALL TO IGNORE EVERY WORD". That was why I posted to Physics Exchange about it, to demonstrate to a friend that when he says "trust me, I'm an expert" you can't trust him.