LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think the Diesel engine would've taken 10 years${}_{60\%}$ or 20 years${}_{45\%}$ longer to be invented: From the Wikipedia article it sounds like it was fairly unintuitive to the people at the time.

Wow, it's worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is "government-complete" and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.

To me "generally avoid processed foods" would be kinda like saying "generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level".

People have been breathing a lot of smoke in the last million years or so, so one might think that we would have evolved to tolerate it, but it's still really bad for us. Though there are certainly lots of ways to go wrong deviating from what we are adapted to, our current unnatural environment is far better for our life expectancy than the natural one. As pointed out in other comments, some food processing can be better for us.

You might be interested in reading this [LW · GW]. I think you are reasoning in an incorrect framing. 

What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?

Or simply that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can't?

I think any theory of school that doesn't mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?

I really can't get the point from the "3. Solve or Reduce Aversions", specifically: 
> Meanwhile, un-endorsed aversions should be targeted with exposure therapy or CoZE.

As I can see, here we should get rid of bad aversions. But the rest part of the text sounds like we should... reinforce them?..
> To apply exposure therapy, build a path of incremental steps towards the aversion

An example that's probably not very large is the discovery of DNA as the inheritance particle.

I had great fun reading Watson's scientific-literary fiction Double Helix. Watson and Crick are very clear that competitors were hot on their heels, a matter of months perhaps.

I sometimes had this feeling from Conway's work, in particular, combinatorial game theory and surreal numbers to me feel closer to mathematical invention than mathematical discovery. This kind of things are also often "leaf nodes" on the tree of knowledge, not leading to many followup discoveries, so you could say their counterfactual impact is low for that reason.

In engineering, the best example I know is vulcanization of rubber. It has had a huge impact on today's world, but Goodyear developed it by working alone for decades, when nobody else was looking in that direction.

Feymann's path integral formulation can't be that counterfactually large. It's mathematically equivalent to Schwingers formulation and done several years earlier by Tomonaga.

Penicillin. Gemini tells me that the antibiotic effects of mold had been noted 30 years earlier, but nobody investigated it as a medicine in all that time.

Gemini is telling you a popular urban legend-level understanding of what happened. The creation of Penicillin as a random event, "by mistake", has at most tangential touch with reality. But it is a great story, so it spread like wildfire. 

In most cases when we read "nobody investigated" it actually means "nobody succeeded yet, so they weren't in a hurry to make it known", which isn't very informative point of data. No one ever succeeds, until they do. And in this case it's not even that - antibiotic properties of some molds were known and applied for centuries before that (well, obviously, before the theory of germs they weren't known as "antibiotic", just that they helped...), the great work of Fleming and later scientists was about finding the particularly effective type of mold and extracting the exact effective chemical as well as finding a way to produce that at scale.