A better title would have been “what a jaded ex-academic with no relevant domain knowledge thinks happened at NASA during the last Columbia mission.”
Yes, they didn’t launch Atlantis on short notice, which was probably in hindsight a mistake. But Greg’s not even wrong when he asserts that “(the combined Atlantis/Columbia crew) could have sat on the (expletive) floor and been alright.” The shuttle went through a complicated sequence of re-entry maneuvers to land safely. It’s not just 3g in one direction until touchdown.
The NASA honchos decided that even if there was damage (caused by a chuck of foam breaking off the external tank during launch and hitting the wing) nothing could be done, so decided not to check for damage (which could have been done with an EVA, or sophisticated ground-based imaging systems, or recon sats).
Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
“Improved CRISPR–Cas9: Safe and Effective?”: “High-fidelity CRISPR–Cas9 nucleases with no detectable genome-wide off-target effects”/”Rationally engineered Cas9 nucleases with improved specificity”
“Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive functions and physical and mental health in UK Biobank (n=112151) and 24 GWAS consortia”, Hagenaars et al 2016
“Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics”, Plomin et al 2016
“The Muscular Dystrophy Patient and Olympic Medalist with the Same Genetic Disorder”
“Genetically low vitamin D concentrations and increased mortality: Mendelian randomisation analysis in three large cohorts”, Afzal et al 2014
Politics/religion:
“Once Upon a Jihad” / “Experiencing Ecstasy: How Bad It Is to Be 20 Years Old”
“Introduction to the Economics of Religion”, Iannaccone 1998
“The Pilot’s Tale: At Sea with 90,000 Tons of Diplomacy”
“Systems, Not Sith: How Inter-service Rivalries Doomed the Galactic Empire”
“Boss Rail: The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom”
“Why China should celebrate Columbus Day”
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search”, Silver et al 2016 (excerpts)
“The Top A.I. Breakthroughs of 2015” (omits residual learning)
“Gradient-based Hyperparameter Optimization through Reversible Learning”, Maclaurin et al 2015
“Recognizing and Localizing Endangered Right Whales with Extremely Deep Neural Networks”
new /r/DecisionTheory subreddit
“Why do we Sometimes get Nonsense-Correlations between Time-Series? A Study in Sampling and the Nature of Time-Series”, Yule 1926 (“the ratio of Catholic vs Protestant marriages correlates r=.95 with the English death rate”)
“Comparison of evidence on harms of medical interventions in randomized and nonrandomized studies”, Papanikolaou et al 2006 (How often does correlation=causation? excerpts)
Psychology/biology:
“A Look Back at 2015 in Longevity Science”
“Bayesian Belief Polarization”, Jern et al 2009
“Stupider Than You Realize”
“The philosophical case against sleeping in”
Frog battery
“Using Neurotechnologies to Develop Virtues—A Buddhist Approach to Cognitive Enhancement”
“Be Happier”
Technology:
“Google releases detailed intervention rates—and the real unsolved problem of robocars”
“The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work”, Rogaway 2015
“These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real: Realistic digital spaces need delusions as much as they need detail”
“Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion”
Economics:
“Does High School Algebra Pass a Cost-Benefit Test?”
When will corporations defect (Schneier’s Liars and Outliers)
“Interview: John A. List”
Jonathan Wild
Philosophy:
“Technology will destroy human nature”
“Lord Russell meet Lord Russell”
Fiction:
“The Star Gauge” of Su Hui
Whoa. Everything old is new again; there’s nothing new under the sun—even the garden of forking paths.
EDIT: A translation probably due to David Hilton, but the publisher locked it away behind a paywall.
I’m pretty sure that Jaynes covered this. Yep. Chapter 5. Converging and Diverging Views.
http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cc05e.pdf
And I would say did a better job at clarifying the issue.
Why did the author of the Be Happy post delete herLessWrong account?
What really happened when NASA faced a “The Martian” like situation.
A better title would have been “what a jaded ex-academic with no relevant domain knowledge thinks happened at NASA during the last Columbia mission.”
Yes, they didn’t launch Atlantis on short notice, which was probably in hindsight a mistake. But Greg’s not even wrong when he asserts that “(the combined Atlantis/Columbia crew) could have sat on the (expletive) floor and been alright.” The shuttle went through a complicated sequence of re-entry maneuvers to land safely. It’s not just 3g in one direction until touchdown.
Is Greg’s core point true?
Sure. But almost everything else is a fractal of tripe.
OK, but doesn’t that make NASA’s actions evil, as in the people in charge deserved to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Legally? No. They were not negligent. The Atlantis rescue mission would have been a heroic measure that could have easily killed yet more astronauts.
Morally? It depends on all this background evidence that we ourselves don’t know and Greg merely speculated toward.
Greg’s core point, which you agreed was true, seems sufficient to morally dam them.