While many people have mentioned similar disappointments, no one has echoed "I'll get that theorem eventually...even though my first try failed!" That was what seemed like a really bad sign when I read the essay before the comments. But I think we're really bad at communicating feelings, so I don't know how the feelings relate, how strong they were, and especially, how the commenters see the parallels with their reactions.

The ancient Greeks themselves played around with the rules. Archimedes used a "marked straightedge" to trisect an angle.

The first hit on google for trisect an angle is about ways to do it, not discussions of impossibility.

I think people should be more careful about the word "science." Here are some meanings I see attached to it:

1. knowledge of nature 2. naturalism 3. "the scientific method" 4. institutions practicing the scientific method 5. rules of a particular institution 6. the output of institutions

I feel compelled to add that what I mean by "the scientific method" is that observation should drive belief and that we can put effort into obtaining useful observations (experiments, stamp collecting). Also, it may be useful to distinguish between institutional rules intended to protect the institution from cheaters and rules intended to protect people from their own biases.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, The word "normative" has stood in the way of my understanding what you mean, at least the first few times I saw you use it, before I pegged you as getting it from the heuristics and biases people. It greatly confused me many times when I first encountered them. It's jargon, so it shouldn't be surprising that different fields use it to mean rather different things.

The heuristics and biases people use it to mean "correct," because social scientists aren't allowed to use that word. I think there's a valuable lesson about academics, institutions, or taboos in there, but I'm not sure what it is. As far as I can tell, they are the only people that use it this way.

My dictionary defines normative as "of, relating to, or prescribing a norm or standard." It's confusing enough that it carries those two or three meanings, but to make it mean "correct" as well is asking for trouble or in-groups.

(parody, I think) story

The story was for real. The site, I dunno, but it does accept money through paypal.

Your conclusion matches your data, but the data is suspiciously focused on charity. Is scope neglect easier to elicit in such contexts? Other explanations include it being hard to make large numbers relevant, and lack of imagination by researchers.

interpretations which postulate an infinitely sliced spatial manifold which is fundamentally real

Strictly speaking, I suppose that is part of the interpretation, but it's a pretty mild part of the interpretation of QM, or at least QFT. Many people expect that this to stop being true in a unification with GR, but that's about physical law, not interpretation.

randomly subject to anthropic constraints, for instance

That might lead us to simulations, quite close to the operating system example.

TGGP, You used an example of moral progress produced by a philosopher: the word consequentialist.

TGGP, What do you mean that you are a consequentialist, if you are so sure ethics is meaningless?