Gavin Leech

There are many first computers, depending on what adjectives you apply. The "official" claim is that ENIAC is the "first electronic, general purpose, large scale, digital computer". For an interesting exploration of what computer is first under what definition, see the interactive website https://www.gleech.org/first-computers I highly recommend the book "ENIAC in Action" for a thorough discussion of the computer. Personally, I view ENIAC as the first influential computer, in the sense that it made multiple groups decide to build computers and thus started the computer revolution. If you went back in time and stopped ENIAC, it would have set back computing by years; the impact of earlier computers was small.

Per https://www.gleech.org/psych: - Stanford Prison Experiment; Not an experiment, abuse was scripted, experimenter constantly intervened, reactions of participants were faked, and there was not even a scientific hypothesis they were testing. Definitely read the paper[0] debunking it. - Milgram Experiment: (the one where people were ordered to shock actors) No good evidence for it. Researchers did not follow script, implausible levels of agreement between different experiments. Killer line is, “only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.” - Robber's Cave: (the one where two groups of kids immediately formed tribal hatred between one another) The conflict was orchestrated by experimenters and the experiment was actually repeated because the first time the kids absolutely refused to turn on one another. More information at [1]. - At best, weak evidence for implicit bias testing and stereotype threat. - Weak evidence of "facial feedback" (smiling causes a good mood and frowning causes a bad mood) - Good evidence against "ego depletion" (the idea that willpower is limited in a muscle-like fashion) - Mixed evidence for Dunning-Kruger effect - Questionable evidence for "hungry judge" effect (the idea that judicial sentences are massively more merciful in the morning and after a lunch recess due to "ego depletion" - this is also thoroughly debunked here [2]) - The 10,000 hours of practice…

If you just want to reference the entire data set of potential "first computers" (including ones that aren't referable in the javaScript app, due to missing toggles), you can access the source data here (warning, small CSV download): https://www.gleech.org/files/computers.csv

I don't trust any studies in psychology, especially social psychology. https://www.gleech.org/psych

Relevant: "Reversals in Psychology" [1] [2] [1] https://www.gleech.org/psych [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27709266

I made a tiny app to solve this kind of disagreement; I was annoyed by the unjust dominance of the ENIAC over Hoelzer's 50 Jahre Computer and the Z3, but also over the Manchester Baby, which really was a massive step forward. There are about 2304 "first" computers, by my model. http://gleech.org/first-computers

I also wondered why people are so freaked out by it, asked around, and came up with these more or less worrying reasons: http://gleech.org/genes-out

Yes, it has major, major problems. There's a post here that lists quite a few of the problems: "Against the Culture" https://archive.is/gv0lG https://www.gleech.org/culture The main sections I like there are "partial reverse alignment" and "the culture as a replicator", with either this or Why the Culture Wins talking about what happens when the Culture runs out of moral patients. "Partial reverse alignment" means brainwashing/language control/constraints on allowed positions in the space of all minds, by the way. You can think what you want about the Culture, and more crudely blatant gamer fantasies like the Optimalverse stuff and Yudkowsky's Fun Sequences, but I consider them all near 100% eternal loss conditions. The Culture's a loss condition anyway because there's no actual humans in it, but even if you swapped those in it's still a horrible end. Edit: the optimalverse stuff is really only good if you want to be shocked out of the whole glob of related ideas, assuming you don't like the idea of being turned into a brainwashed cartoon pony like creature. Otherwise avoid it.

For those interested, here's my critique of sleep science (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#our-priors-about-sleep-research-sho… >Do you believe in power-posing? In ego depletion? In hungry judges and brain training? [1] >If the answer is no, then your priors for our knowledge about sleep should be weak because “sleep science” is mostly just rebranded cognitive psychology, with the vast majority of it being small-n, not pre-registered, p-hacked experiments. >I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables of interest [2] (the authors changed analysis post-hoc and fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put the post-hoc results into the abstract but decided not to mention the null-preregistered results there or anywhere else in the paper explicitly). >So why has sleep research not been facing a severe replication crisis, similar to psychology? >First, compared to psychology, where you just have people fill out questionnaires, sleep research is slow, relatively expensive, and requires specialized equipment (e.g. EEG, actigraphs). So skeptical outsiders go for easier targets (like social psychology) while the insiders keep doing the same shoddy experiments because they need to keep their careers going somehow. >Second, imagine if sleep…