Even a consequentialist should accept that it would have taken 16 years to realize it was actually a good thing to do with orange peels.

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dessimus an hour ago | parent [-]

The article says they returned after that long having forgotten about the experiment. I think they would have recognized there were positive results long before that if someone happened to be checking in at say Year 2, 5 or 10. It not like the land was still barren piles of orange peel at Year 14 and then suddenly Yahtzee!

	▲	cucumber3732842 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Did they forget? Or did they know this would happen before dumping the first peel and it simply wasn't worth the money it would take to prove it in the public record? Because what I bet happened is that off the public record who knew their stuff said "this will happen" and then the government rep said "you need to pay some sort of 3rd party with a government license to weigh in on such matters an obscene amount of money to produce a report that says that on the public record" and it was a nonstarter so the project just died and now 16yr later here we are.