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I would love to hear suggestions for other things I could try. If you have any, let me know in a comment!
Do you know what the drug was which did this?
Nitpick: you're talking about the discovery of the structure of DNA; it was already known at that time to be the particle which mediates inheritance IIRC.
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1I buy this argument.
I buy this argument.
I don't buy mathematical equivalence as an argument against, in this case, since the whole point of the path integral formulation is that it's mathematically equivalent but far simpler conceptually and computationally.
Man, that top one was a mess. Fixed now, thank you!
Here are some candidates from Claude and Gemini (Claude Opus seemed considerably better than Gemini Pro for this task). Unfortunately they are quite unreliable: I've already removed many examples from this list which I already knew to have multiple independent discoverers (like e.g. CRISPR and general relativity). If you're familiar with the history of any of these enough to say that they clearly were/weren't very counterfactual, please leave a comment.
- Noether's Theorem
- Mendel's Laws of Inheritance
- Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem (Claude mentions Von Neumann as an independent discoverer for the Second Incompleteness Theorem)
- Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics
- Onnes' discovery of superconductivity
- Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix structure in proteins
- McClintock's work on transposons
- Observation of the cosmic microwave background
- Lorentz's work on deterministic chaos
- Prusiner's discovery of prions
- Yamanaka factors for inducing pluripotency
- Langmuir's adsorption isotherm (I have no idea what this is)
I somehow missed that John Wentworth and David Lorell are also in the middle of a sequence on this same topic here.
Yeah, uh... hopefully nobody's holding their breath waiting for the rest of that sequence. That was the original motivator, but we only wrote the one post and don't have any more in development yet.
Point is: please do write a good stat mech sequence, David and I are not really "on that ball" at the moment.
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Another class of applications which we discussed at the retreat: person 1 takes the amnesic, person 2 shares private information on them, and then person gives their reaction to the private information. Can be used e.g. for complex negotiations: maybe it is in our mutual best interest to make some deal, but in order for me to know that I'd need some information which you don't want to share with me, so I take the drug, you share the information, and I record some verified record of myself saying "dear future self, you should in fact take this deal".
... which is cool in theory but I would guess not of high immediate value in practice, which is why the post didn't focus on it.