[link] Faster than light neutrinos due to loose fiber optic cable.

I have a possible explanation. However I have very little confidence in it and primarily proffer it for entertainment value, since I think Douglas_Knight's post may have been a joke.

There have been 4 opera threads I've noted. This one, and 3 previous.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8hh/opera_confirms_neutrinos_travel_faster_than_light/ (November, XiXiDu)

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/83c/particles_may_not_have_broken_light_speed_limit/ (October, Me)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7rc/particles_break_lightspeed_limit/ (September, Kevin)

September was the initial thread (They may be breaking light speed?) No near top comment that I found (I did not check sub threads). October was a possible counter argument thread. Vladimir objected to me posting this thread. For more than one reason, and I appreciated his critique. November was the additional confirming evidence thread. No near top comment that I found (I did not check sub threads) February is another counter argument thread. Vladimir objected to the posting of this thread.

This is just barely enough evidence for accusing Vladimir of publication bias to be funny (you've objected to 2 retractions and you haven't objected to 2 confirmations!), but not enough to be taken seriously. And humor tends to be upvoted well. I think.

That being said, I would not be surprised to be TOTALLY off base on Douglas_Knight's comment, since this is just my Internal Narrator trying to mash together evidence for a hypothesis to explain what I think is a joke. If for instance, he wasn't joking, this is all just a silly theory.

Other thoughts to consider:

How many people are going to read through all of those threads just to make a stats joke? Apparently, this includes myself.

If enough of the same people think "Opera Anomaly? I want to read this!" They may have been subconciously aware of Vladimir_Nesov's earlier comments. When Douglas Knight completed the loop out loud, it may have been funny, since some humor tends to contain a "Complete this pattern that I am aware of but have not actually verbalized!" format.

That may have been too much expansion. But on the upside, there are also links to previous Opera threads. Feel free to come up with a better (or more entertaining) hypothesis of Douglas_Knight's remarks based on that reading.

This works only to some extent, otherwise throwing all of the Internet in one big cauldron and stirring a bit would make no difference.

It's not a picture of a cute kitten, for crying out loud. Nor is it a gateway drug or a frictionless slippery slope. There IS a bid difference between a random news item and new information about something we have already had epistemic discussions about. There are even new considerations now about how much wish should be wary of confirmation bias when handling this evidence.

That "some extent" more than covers this page. So if you are not interested, really, don't click.

I agree that this doesn't clearly apply to this particular case, I was talking more about news in general.

Yes, news in general is boring. I avoid news enough that this post is the first I heard (and only likely source) about this subject.

Things other that discussions on LW, the measure of its comparative quality.

For example I could have spent that 20 seconds researching new conversation material so I don't lose nerd status when I meet with my engineer friends? Oh.

That's a fairly big goalpost switch by the way. You went from saying lesswrong should be distracted by this and it should be talked about elsewhere to relying on lesswrong itself being for most intents and purposes a waste of time relative to actually living. In fact, since your initial move was to place this topics outside the scope of lesswrong the comparison ends up being, among other things, between reading a lesswrong spin on neutrinos-speed research and discussing the same subject somewhere else where the relevant biases related to updating on this kind of research wouldn't even be comprehended.

18 meters of air, ~12 meters of glass, ~36 meters of going through glass instead of air, and a lot of meters for going through faster glass rather than slower glass when connection is tightened (and don't think of the signal bouncing at an angle and arriving slower, that's not how fibre optics works). If they have a long glass cable, you can be certain that delay has to be actually measured because speed is temperature dependent.

And in terms of the actual change in how far the light travels - quite possibly 0 meters.

The point of the conversion from nanoseconds to meters is to have some sort of intuitive reference just how much behind the signal must get via lousy connection.

It's a recipe for intuitive confusion. We know there is a hardware fault of some kind due to connection difficulties. We don't know the precise nature of the error introduced by the connection problem. There is more than one way a messed up connection could result in an electronic device giving input too slowly, few due to introducing more actual distance traveled and many giving absurd distance reading in the km for reasons entirely unrelated to the speed of light.

If you absolutely must use a distance metric to measure a fault with time reporting then I recommend adopting the unit "nano lightseconds".