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?
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Someone who seemed a bit better informed
And that comment is answered by:
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.
The “new ligament discovered” angle gets less impressive (to me, at least) when I read this part:
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.
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.