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All of fela's Comments + Replies

Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Certain That 53 Is Prime
fela40

it actually wouldn't take all that much evidence to convince us that, for example, "the numbers chosen in last night's lottery were 4, 2, 9, 7, 8 and 3." The correct response to this argument is to say that the prior probability of a miracle occurring is orders of magnitude smaller than mere one in a million odds.

That doesn't seem right. If somebody tries to convince me that the result of a fair 5 number lottery is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 I would have a much harder time believing it, but not because the probability is less then one in a million. I think... (read more)

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Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
fela90

Here are two articles quite skeptical of polyphasic sleep that might be of interest.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htm

I don't necessarily agree with the author, but I guess it's good to be aware of arguments on both sides of the debate.

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1Jonathan_Graehl
I thought this was quite damning. It's been in circulation for a long time (since 2010?) without any refutation. That said, it is clear that there's a tension between (mental) sleep efficiency and sleep debt. Unfortunately, it's easy to demonstrate all kinds of mental impairment from undersleeping.
A brief history of ethically concerned scientists
fela200

Jared Diamond, in Guns Germs and Steel, argues that when the time is ripe scientific discoveries are made quite regardless of who makes them, give or take a few decades. Most discoveries are incremental, and many are made by multiple people simultaneously. So wouldn't a discovery that isn't published be just made elsewhere in a few years time, possibly by someone without many ethical concerns?

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adam_strandberg200

Even a few years of delay can make a big difference if you are in the middle of a major war. If Galston hadn't published his results and they weren't found until a decade or two later, the US probably wouldn't have used Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly with chlorine gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, etc. Granted, delaying the invention doesn't necessarily make the overall outcome better. If the atomic bomb wasn't invented until the 1950s and we didn't have the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the US or USSR would probably have been more likely to use them against each other.

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6Eliezer Yudkowsky
What a good thing for all of us that Leo Szilard did not make this mistake.
5lukeprog
Maybe. I'm not an expert on the history of science, but it seems to me like: * Lots of psychology could have been done decades or maybe a century earlier, but nobody bothered until the mid-20th century. * If Einstein hadn't figured out General Relativity, it might have been another 15-25 years before somebody else figured it out. * On the other hand, things like computers and Bayes nets and the structure of DNA wouldn't have taken much longer to discover if their actual discoverers hadn't been on the case for whatever reason.
0ricketson
Especially in the modern environment with many thousands of scientists, there won't be much delay caused by a few scientists witholding their results. The greatest risk is that the discovery is made by someone who will keep it secret in order to increase their own power. There is also a risk that keeping secrets will breed mistrust, even if the secret is kept without evil intent.