A point against there being important, chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence is that if there were such insights, they’d likely be simple, and if they’d be simple, they likely would have been discovered already. So the fact that no one has yet discovered any such brilliant, simple idea is evidence against them existing. (I’m not the first to point out the increasing difficulty of making new contributions in math/science; gwern says anything referencing Jones on this page may be relevant. Compare the breadth and applicability of the discoveries made by a genius from centuries ago like Gauss or Euler, who discovered things which are taught to engineering undergraduates, vs a modern genius like Grothendieck).
A point against there being important, chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence is that if there were such insights, they’d likely be simple, and if they’d be simple, they likely would have been discovered already. So the fact that no one has yet discovered any such brilliant, simple idea is evidence against them existing.
We can’t consider “chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence”—and then argue that they don’t exist because they would have already been discovered. We can’t have already discovered “undiscovered insights”—and we have certainly discovered plenty of big insights already. The problem is not so much that big insights don’t exist, it is more that we seem to have discovered a lot of them already.
Sure, it doesn’t sound like we disagree on anything.
Might be interesting to try to plot the number of big insights made per year to see if they were trailing off yet or not. One potential problem would be figuring out whether a recent insight was going to end up being “big” or not.
A point against there being important, chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence is that if there were such insights, they’d likely be simple, and if they’d be simple, they likely would have been discovered already. So the fact that no one has yet discovered any such brilliant, simple idea is evidence against them existing. (I’m not the first to point out the increasing difficulty of making new contributions in math/science; gwern says anything referencing Jones on this page may be relevant. Compare the breadth and applicability of the discoveries made by a genius from centuries ago like Gauss or Euler, who discovered things which are taught to engineering undergraduates, vs a modern genius like Grothendieck).
We can’t consider “chunky undiscovered insights in to intelligence”—and then argue that they don’t exist because they would have already been discovered. We can’t have already discovered “undiscovered insights”—and we have certainly discovered plenty of big insights already. The problem is not so much that big insights don’t exist, it is more that we seem to have discovered a lot of them already.
Sure, it doesn’t sound like we disagree on anything.
Might be interesting to try to plot the number of big insights made per year to see if they were trailing off yet or not. One potential problem would be figuring out whether a recent insight was going to end up being “big” or not.