Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions.

• Including good cupholders isn't a trivial problem, at all. From silicone cushioning to automatic cup-locking, to lighting, to thermoplastic insets, to accommodating a vast range of different sizes, from coffee cups to super-gulp 1.5 liter monstrosities, the list goes on. Compare to: What is the optimal can size, and form? Seems easy enough, yet far from a "solved" or trivial problem.

• There are immense safety issues: If they impede the driver in his normal operation of the car, the manufacturer could be liable to lawsuits. Mustn't impede airbags, even using the largest fitting cups, or liable for lawsuits. Must be secure from spilling (not only an issue for 4x4 offroaders, but also for normal cars on the occasional bumpy road, or going up and down a ramp), or liable for lawsuits.

• There are people specifically responsible for designing cupholders, up to whole companies, in fact. I remember an article stating that there were man-years dedicated just to the cupholder for some specific car model.

• Real estate in a car is at a premium, especially the easily accessible portion. Accommodating someone who wants 3 beverages within easy reach (such as yourself) may annoy someone who just wants one, and doesn't like the way so many cupholders wreak havoc with other elements of the interior design (which you listed as an even bigger priority).

• Outside of the US (say Europe), cupholders have a much lower priority (at least according to an article I'm just now reading). Eating and drinking cupious amounts in a car - while not unusual - isn't as common everywhere as it is in the US. (Obviously this point doesn't apply to car models that are manufactured exclusively for the US market.)

The Ghandi example works because he was posited with one goal.

And unchanged circumstances. What would Ghandi do when faced with a trolley problem?

I fear bees way less than I fear super-torment. Let's go with the bees.

What does it have by way of input?

Indeed not.

In this particular case, can you recommend any better way of finding out what the limits to precision actually are?

The most important reason I can think of: the largest number of decibans that's yet been mentioned is 160 (though that's more of a delta, going from -80 to +80 decibans); the highest actual number of decibans is around 100. This gives me reasonably good confidence that if any practical rules-of-thumb involving decibans I come up with can handle, say, from -127 to +127 decibans (easily storable in a single byte), then that should be sufficient to handle just about anything I come across, and I don't have to spend the time and effort trying to extend that rule-of-thumb to 1,000 decibans.

I'm also interested in finding out what the /range/ of highest decibans given is. One person said 50; another said 100. This gives an idea of how loosely calibrated even LWers are when dealing with extreme levels of confidences, and suggests that figuring out a decent way /to/ calibrate such confidences is an area worth looking into.

An extremely minor reason, but I feel like mentioning it anyway: I'm the one and only DataPacRat, and this feels like a shiny piece of data to collect and hoard even if it doesn't ever turn out to have any practical use.

the answer is obviously "yes" with probability that only negligibly differs from 1.

That's the general answer I'm aiming to evoke; I'm trying to get a better idea of just how big that 'negligibly' is.

I live my life under the assumption that it is correct, and I do not make allowances in my strategic thinking that it may be false. As for how hard it would be to convince me I was wrong, I am currently sufficiently invested in the atomic theory of matter that I can't think, off-hand, what such evidence would look like. But I presume (hope) that a well-stated falsifiable experiment which showed matter as a continuum would convince me to become curious.

I've been looking into beeminder and procrastinating about using it. The irony of this has not escaped me.

There is a class of things I don't want to do so much as have done, such as exercise; this is the sort of thing I'd like to use beeminder for. The internal fear leading to the procrastination seems to be "oh, crap, if I take step X that is likely to override my defenses against doing Y, I might actually do Y."

My brain goes to remarkable lengths to undermine me.