You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

mushroom comments on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: witzvo 02 November 2013 04:37PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (299)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 November 2013 01:31:33AM 7 points [-]

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?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 November 2013 01:24:57PM 3 points [-]

My layperson guess is that once you're told what to expect to see, you stop looking.

This makes Eliezer's weirdtopia idea of science being kept secret so as not to spoil people's fun of discovery more interesting-- it's not just that people would independently discover the same things (and I wonder what the protocol for sharing information would be), given enough time and intelligence, much more might get discovered.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 November 2013 02:03:22PM 1 point [-]

Someone who seemed a bit better informed

Could be a few things - looks like part of one of the other ligaments, is usually damaged doing a 'standard' dissection, plain old 'you see what you think you should see' bias, some combo of all of the above...

And that comment is answered by:

Medicine needs more Masters and PhD students. I'm sure if they had as many students studying the body in extreme detail, like the eleventy billion English majors who write thesis/dissertations on say, Shakespeare, this would've been hammered out decades ago. XD

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 07 November 2013 05:39:20PM 1 point [-]

The "new ligament discovered" angle gets less impressive (to me, at least) when I read this part:

Their starting point: an 1879 article by a French surgeon that postulated the existence of an additional ligament located on the anterior of the human knee.

Comment author: gwern 07 November 2013 08:06:06PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 09 November 2013 03:25:47PM 1 point [-]

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.