8 ms·

Hyman Rickover on Nuclear Reactor Designs (1953) [pdf]

85 points by nkurz 7y ago

nkurz 7y ago
You are likely familiar with the quip that "While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." Here's a delightful letter by "The Father of the Nuclear Navy" Admiral Hyman Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover) on how that saying applies to nuclear reactor design. Excerpts: An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little develop- ment is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated. It's a short two-page letter, so I won't excerpt more. It merits reading in full.
- freepor 7y ago
  My preferred formulation is “In theory, it works in practice; in practice, it works in theory.”
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 7y ago
  That really does sum up all the gaps between the promises of "too cheap to meter" and the practical expensive reality. Doubly so for things that haven't made it out of the lab at all, such as thorium reactors. There's always people willing to give the "academic reactor" sales pitch for nuclear on here, especially as a reason not to proceed with some scheme using a renewable, proven but intermittent technology like wind or solar.
- jhayward 7y ago
  He has a quote from somewhere that I can't locate at the moment which is (paraphrased) "any new reactor design is always safer and more efficient than existing designs, until they get built, which is when they become expensive and less safe". I always have to refrain from trotting that out whenever the pro-nuclear fans trot out how wonderful Gen-IV, or MSR, or whatever lights up their fantasies will be.
watersb 7y ago
My father-in-law was just getting used to his new posting when Admiral Rickover came for an inspection. Talk about pressure.
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  That culture of pressure never changed, and they are better for it. The best analogy I can give you is this: Imagine your CTO just decides to walk up to your datacenter to throw open a breaker or few to verify that your failover and redundancy tech works correctly. The CTO doesn't do this often - just once every few months. Each time the failure mode is different. Remove a live hard drive, disconnect some network switches, etc. The only reason she does it to is to emphasize the importance of these drills upon her VPs and directors. They run drills of this nature on their teams every few days.
  - sien 7y ago
    I actually had a boss who was a CTO who would do something like this. He was a good boss. At another job I did something daft and tried to recover a backup. The backups hadn't actually been recoverable for at least 2 years.
  - solotronics 7y ago
    This happens to us regularly without someone having to go play chaos monkey.
  - kstenerud 7y ago
    Simulating a power failure to test and prove the resiliency of the system is precisely what caused the Chernobyl disaster.
    - killjoywashere 7y ago
      Ah, no. The cause of Chernobyl is lost to the dead but probably caused by a young engineer who didn't quite do the right thing. You absolutely must drill for rare, high stakes events. Auto-rotations in helicopters. Mass casualties in hospitals. Reactor scrams. Man overboard on a ship. All these things are drilled because you don't have time to read the book when it actually happens, and it rarely happens.
redis_mlc 7y ago
WW2 Germany had Donitz, and Cold War US had Rickover - both were giants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz Nuclear power is a game-changer, allowing aircraft carriers to sail completely around the globe at speeds fast enough to barefoot water-ski behind.
- ambicapter 7y ago
  The words "nuclear" don't appear in this wikipedia article. It does state, however, that Dönitz was closely wedded to Nazi ideology.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    You're missing the point. Both were the successful leaders that their era and countries needed. Donitz almost defeated Britain using his submarine fleet alone (he just didn't get the number requested.) Rickover's accomplishment wasn't demonstrating that nuclear power was useful, it was getting the support and funding to actually roll out the new technology. To this day, no other country has a nuclear aircraft carrier besides the US and France.
    - valuearb 7y ago
      75% of U-boat crew died in combat, primarily because Donitz never changed their cryptography and gave them tons of radio traffic to decipher. "Radio traffic compromised his ciphers by giving the Allies more messages to work with. Furthermore, replies from the boats enabled the Allies to use direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its radio, track it and attack it.[64][65] The over-centralised command structure of BdU and its insistence on micro-managing every aspect of U-boat operations with endless signals provided the Allied navies with enormous intelligence"
      - soperj 7y ago
        They did change their cryptography. They changed the settings on the enigma machine daily, and they also went through various versions through the war.
nemosaltat 7y ago
Prior navy Nuke- it’s hard to explain how much Rickover continues to permeate the Navy Nuclear program. When you start your naval nuclear career, you still literally have to go through Rickover. That is, the building where all naval nuclear training begins is “The Rickover” in Goose Greek, SC.
JohnCClarke 7y ago
Wow! I wish the thorium enthusiasts would all read this.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Small molten salt reactors were actually built. They weren't just paper reactors, even in Rickover's day. Now there are companies working on MSRs for commercial use. There's more computer simulation than running reactors so far, partly because governments are much more cautious now. But I'll also point out that Rickover in 1957 had no idea what computers in 2020 would be capable of. I think it's reasonable to suspect that we didn't find the best possible reactor design six decades ago.
  - brandmeyer 7y ago
    The part that the computers help with - nuclear and thermodynamic physics ODEs - isn't the hard part. A couple of sharp grad students can do that with OpenFOAM and a modest workstation. The hard parts are the operations, maintenance, building for robustness, and enormous amounts of empirical field experience with the materials. Rickover and his contemporaries judged - rightly - that those issues would make MSR and metal-cooled reactors too finicky to be of practical military value.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      ...but there actually was a liquid sodium reactor sub built in the 50s, from what I've heard.
      - brandmeyer 7y ago
        Only one. She was a contemporary of the Nautilus. It was their experience with that vessel that killed liquid metal coolant for the navy. It might help to understand something special about the nuclear navy in those days - prototypes in the lab don't count. Prototypes on land don't count either. The only prototypes that counted were ones that actually went to sea. All the way through the Skipjack generation, they were regularly doing crazy-eyed one-off experiments. Nautilus and Seawolf were both prototypes.
factchecker01 7y ago
PBS had a good documentary on this. https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dctoedt 7y ago
Another ex-Navy nuke here. More than 45 years later, I can still practically recite both sides of my interview with the KOG,* which was necessary to get into The Program. Here's an excerpt. Important to the story is that I was escorted into Rickover's office by a senior officer who was in training to be a submarine skipper. Also relevant is that I was younger than the usual candidate. KOG: Why do you want in my program? Me: From what I've seen of the submarine fleet, there's a lot of professionalism there; I'd like to be part of that. [Later, in nuclear power school, I switched to surface, and spent my sea time aboard the carrier USS Enterprise.] KOG: So you don't think there's any professionalism in the surface fleet? Me: I didn't say that, Admiral. KOG [to the escort officer]: Read back what the kid said. Escort officer: Mr. Toedt thinks there's a lot of professionalism in the submarine fleet and not in the surface fleet. KOG: [Angrily points out my personal failings, ending with:] You're shooting your g--damn mouth off about something you don't know a g--damn thing about. What do you think of that? Me: That's not what I said, Admiral. [At this point I started getting pissed off.] KOG: [More vigorous imparting of wisdom, ending with:] Have you learned anything? Me [angrier than I've ever been, before or since]: Yes, SIR. KOG: What's that? Me: Not to shoot my [pause] MOUTH off about something I don't know a [pause] thing ABOUT — SIR. The interview went downhill from there, including inquiries about my sex life. I figured I'd bilged the interview and would be heading for destroyer school, which had been my preference anyway (the officers at my NROTC unit had strongly "encouraged" me to apply for The Program instead). I was shocked afterwards when the nice older lady congratulated me on having been accepted to The Program and asked which of the two nuclear power schools did I want to attend. After the interview I realized that Rickover and the escort officer had intentionally been f--king with me as one of his little stress tests, the stories about which are legion [0]. * KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman. The nuke joke was that he checked the box for at most two out of those four things. [0] https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-needed.html https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-ne...
- Tade0 7y ago
  I wonder what his reaction would be if you went with something similar to the Grand Budapest Hotel job interview scene.
- deleted 7y ago
selimthegrim 7y ago
Rickover has a case to answer for the Thresher: http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1983/jul-aug/schratz.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.m... >Beneath the surface, however, was always the cold, unrelenting, ruthless workaholic, undermining the bureaucracy while creating his own. His was a management textbook for the inside operator, organized to the smallest detail, intolerant of error, devoting everything including his personal life to a cause, an obsession. Rickover established a constituency in Congress by superior salesmanship of his own product and skillful sowing of dissension and division in competing programs. Carefully slanting facts and covering up what he did not want disclosed, he skillfully manipulated his two bosses to become what the authors call "The Unaccountable Man." He destroyed any competing nuclear program within his own organization and any person likely to emerge as a competitor or successor. In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  On the subject of this thread: >The cult of personality produced other adverse side effects. Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology. Rickover put the kiss of death on programs generated within the Office of Naval Research and elsewhere for smaller, lightweight reactors that could reduce the enormous size and cost of nuclear-powered ships. None saw the light of day; all were thwarted as interference in his work. When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.
dredmorbius 7y ago
It's Rickover's concluding paragraph I find most compelling: Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible. That resounds today, especially with a novel current rapidly-spreading challenge, and responses around the planet which fail all three of Rickover's admonishments. The essay itself has long resonated with me: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g_rickover_paper_reactors/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g...
- specialist 7y ago
  Off topic: What are your thoughts about hoaxes, cults, groupthink? I'm hoping to find explainers in the same way Sara Robinson and David Neiwert have tried to study and understand authoritarianism. https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-defining.html https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-... FWIW, I am scanning your prior posts (HN, reddit, mastodon). I try to pay attention to "explainers" like you, Slate Star Codex, Gwern, Ezra Klein, David Roberts (also Vox), Bill Gates, others. People who voraciously consume info, synthesize it, and try to explain it to the rest of us.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    That''s a very complex topic. Of possible relevance, and reflecting one current of my thinking: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
perl4ever 7y ago
TIL there was a Seawolf sub long before the Seawolf-class. That explains a lot.

85 points by nkurz 7y ago

You are likely familiar with the quip that "While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is." Here's a delightful letter by "The Father of the Nuclear Navy" Admiral Hyman Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover) on how that saying applies to nuclear reactor design. Excerpts: An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little develop- ment is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated. It's a short two-page letter, so I won't excerpt more. It merits reading in full.

freepor 7y ago
My preferred formulation is “In theory, it works in practice; in practice, it works in theory.”
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 7y ago
That really does sum up all the gaps between the promises of "too cheap to meter" and the practical expensive reality. Doubly so for things that haven't made it out of the lab at all, such as thorium reactors. There's always people willing to give the "academic reactor" sales pitch for nuclear on here, especially as a reason not to proceed with some scheme using a renewable, proven but intermittent technology like wind or solar.
jhayward 7y ago
He has a quote from somewhere that I can't locate at the moment which is (paraphrased) "any new reactor design is always safer and more efficient than existing designs, until they get built, which is when they become expensive and less safe". I always have to refrain from trotting that out whenever the pro-nuclear fans trot out how wonderful Gen-IV, or MSR, or whatever lights up their fantasies will be.

watersb 7y ago

My father-in-law was just getting used to his new posting when Admiral Rickover came for an inspection. Talk about pressure.

brandmeyer 7y ago
That culture of pressure never changed, and they are better for it. The best analogy I can give you is this: Imagine your CTO just decides to walk up to your datacenter to throw open a breaker or few to verify that your failover and redundancy tech works correctly. The CTO doesn't do this often - just once every few months. Each time the failure mode is different. Remove a live hard drive, disconnect some network switches, etc. The only reason she does it to is to emphasize the importance of these drills upon her VPs and directors. They run drills of this nature on their teams every few days.
- sien 7y ago
  I actually had a boss who was a CTO who would do something like this. He was a good boss. At another job I did something daft and tried to recover a backup. The backups hadn't actually been recoverable for at least 2 years.
- solotronics 7y ago
  This happens to us regularly without someone having to go play chaos monkey.
- kstenerud 7y ago
  Simulating a power failure to test and prove the resiliency of the system is precisely what caused the Chernobyl disaster.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Ah, no. The cause of Chernobyl is lost to the dead but probably caused by a young engineer who didn't quite do the right thing. You absolutely must drill for rare, high stakes events. Auto-rotations in helicopters. Mass casualties in hospitals. Reactor scrams. Man overboard on a ship. All these things are drilled because you don't have time to read the book when it actually happens, and it rarely happens.

redis_mlc 7y ago

WW2 Germany had Donitz, and Cold War US had Rickover - both were giants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz Nuclear power is a game-changer, allowing aircraft carriers to sail completely around the globe at speeds fast enough to barefoot water-ski behind.

ambicapter 7y ago
The words "nuclear" don't appear in this wikipedia article. It does state, however, that Dönitz was closely wedded to Nazi ideology.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  You're missing the point. Both were the successful leaders that their era and countries needed. Donitz almost defeated Britain using his submarine fleet alone (he just didn't get the number requested.) Rickover's accomplishment wasn't demonstrating that nuclear power was useful, it was getting the support and funding to actually roll out the new technology. To this day, no other country has a nuclear aircraft carrier besides the US and France.
  - valuearb 7y ago
    75% of U-boat crew died in combat, primarily because Donitz never changed their cryptography and gave them tons of radio traffic to decipher. "Radio traffic compromised his ciphers by giving the Allies more messages to work with. Furthermore, replies from the boats enabled the Allies to use direction finding (HF/DF, called "Huff-Duff") to locate a U-boat using its radio, track it and attack it.[64][65] The over-centralised command structure of BdU and its insistence on micro-managing every aspect of U-boat operations with endless signals provided the Allied navies with enormous intelligence"
    - soperj 7y ago
      They did change their cryptography. They changed the settings on the enigma machine daily, and they also went through various versions through the war.

nemosaltat 7y ago

Prior navy Nuke- it’s hard to explain how much Rickover continues to permeate the Navy Nuclear program. When you start your naval nuclear career, you still literally have to go through Rickover. That is, the building where all naval nuclear training begins is “The Rickover” in Goose Greek, SC.

JohnCClarke 7y ago

Wow! I wish the thorium enthusiasts would all read this.

DennisP 7y ago
Small molten salt reactors were actually built. They weren't just paper reactors, even in Rickover's day. Now there are companies working on MSRs for commercial use. There's more computer simulation than running reactors so far, partly because governments are much more cautious now. But I'll also point out that Rickover in 1957 had no idea what computers in 2020 would be capable of. I think it's reasonable to suspect that we didn't find the best possible reactor design six decades ago.
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  The part that the computers help with - nuclear and thermodynamic physics ODEs - isn't the hard part. A couple of sharp grad students can do that with OpenFOAM and a modest workstation. The hard parts are the operations, maintenance, building for robustness, and enormous amounts of empirical field experience with the materials. Rickover and his contemporaries judged - rightly - that those issues would make MSR and metal-cooled reactors too finicky to be of practical military value.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    ...but there actually was a liquid sodium reactor sub built in the 50s, from what I've heard.
    - brandmeyer 7y ago
      Only one. She was a contemporary of the Nautilus. It was their experience with that vessel that killed liquid metal coolant for the navy. It might help to understand something special about the nuclear navy in those days - prototypes in the lab don't count. Prototypes on land don't count either. The only prototypes that counted were ones that actually went to sea. All the way through the Skipjack generation, they were regularly doing crazy-eyed one-off experiments. Nautilus and Seawolf were both prototypes.

factchecker01 7y ago

PBS had a good documentary on this. https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM https://youtu.be/G0p8bWYY7qM

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dctoedt 7y ago

Another ex-Navy nuke here. More than 45 years later, I can still practically recite both sides of my interview with the KOG,* which was necessary to get into The Program. Here's an excerpt. Important to the story is that I was escorted into Rickover's office by a senior officer who was in training to be a submarine skipper. Also relevant is that I was younger than the usual candidate. KOG: Why do you want in my program? Me: From what I've seen of the submarine fleet, there's a lot of professionalism there; I'd like to be part of that. [Later, in nuclear power school, I switched to surface, and spent my sea time aboard the carrier USS Enterprise.] KOG: So you don't think there's any professionalism in the surface fleet? Me: I didn't say that, Admiral. KOG [to the escort officer]: Read back what the kid said. Escort officer: Mr. Toedt thinks there's a lot of professionalism in the submarine fleet and not in the surface fleet. KOG: [Angrily points out my personal failings, ending with:] You're shooting your g--damn mouth off about something you don't know a g--damn thing about. What do you think of that? Me: That's not what I said, Admiral. [At this point I started getting pissed off.] KOG: [More vigorous imparting of wisdom, ending with:] Have you learned anything? Me [angrier than I've ever been, before or since]: Yes, SIR. KOG: What's that? Me: Not to shoot my [pause] MOUTH off about something I don't know a [pause] thing ABOUT — SIR. The interview went downhill from there, including inquiries about my sex life. I figured I'd bilged the interview and would be heading for destroyer school, which had been my preference anyway (the officers at my NROTC unit had strongly "encouraged" me to apply for The Program instead). I was shocked afterwards when the nice older lady congratulated me on having been accepted to The Program and asked which of the two nuclear power schools did I want to attend. After the interview I realized that Rickover and the escort officer had intentionally been f--king with me as one of his little stress tests, the stories about which are legion [0]. * KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman. The nuke joke was that he checked the box for at most two out of those four things. [0] https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-needed.html https://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/02/rickover-stories-ne...

Tade0 7y ago
I wonder what his reaction would be if you went with something similar to the Grand Budapest Hotel job interview scene.
deleted 7y ago

selimthegrim 7y ago

Rickover has a case to answer for the Thresher: http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1983/jul-aug/schratz.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170514181829/http://www.au.af.m... >Beneath the surface, however, was always the cold, unrelenting, ruthless workaholic, undermining the bureaucracy while creating his own. His was a management textbook for the inside operator, organized to the smallest detail, intolerant of error, devoting everything including his personal life to a cause, an obsession. Rickover established a constituency in Congress by superior salesmanship of his own product and skillful sowing of dissension and division in competing programs. Carefully slanting facts and covering up what he did not want disclosed, he skillfully manipulated his two bosses to become what the authors call "The Unaccountable Man." He destroyed any competing nuclear program within his own organization and any person likely to emerge as a competitor or successor. In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."

selimthegrim 7y ago
On the subject of this thread: >The cult of personality produced other adverse side effects. Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology. Rickover put the kiss of death on programs generated within the Office of Naval Research and elsewhere for smaller, lightweight reactors that could reduce the enormous size and cost of nuclear-powered ships. None saw the light of day; all were thwarted as interference in his work. When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.

dredmorbius 7y ago

It's Rickover's concluding paragraph I find most compelling: Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible. That resounds today, especially with a novel current rapidly-spreading challenge, and responses around the planet which fail all three of Rickover's admonishments. The essay itself has long resonated with me: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g_rickover_paper_reactors/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28q61o/hyman_g...

specialist 7y ago
Off topic: What are your thoughts about hoaxes, cults, groupthink? I'm hoping to find explainers in the same way Sara Robinson and David Neiwert have tried to study and understand authoritarianism. https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-defining.html https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-... FWIW, I am scanning your prior posts (HN, reddit, mastodon). I try to pay attention to "explainers" like you, Slate Star Codex, Gwern, Ezra Klein, David Roberts (also Vox), Bill Gates, others. People who voraciously consume info, synthesize it, and try to explain it to the rest of us.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  That''s a very complex topic. Of possible relevance, and reflecting one current of my thinking: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

perl4ever 7y ago

TIL there was a Seawolf sub long before the Seawolf-class. That explains a lot.