The situations where Reason stops being useful is when you make optimal bayesian use of sensory information, in that situation, yeah, additional experiments are required to make progress. However that is a monstrously high bar to pass. We already know that quantum mechanics governs everything about protein behavior in principle, if you gave a million motivated super-Einsteins 1000 years to think, do you seriously believe that they could not produce a theory of weird proteins never encountered before?
I also think we mean slightly different things by “bottlenecked by reason”, what I mean is something like “given a problem and your current resources, there exists an amount N of Reasoning ability that will make you able to solve the problem, for most problems we have today in the developed world”. The amount required for specific problems might be very large, and small increases below that might not overwhelm the noise and randomness of the world. So I don’t find it surprising that intelligent people have not completely taken over the world.
The situations where Reason stops being useful is when you make optimal bayesian use of sensory information, in that situation, yeah, additional experiments are required to make progress. However that is a monstrously high bar to pass. We already know that quantum mechanics governs everything about protein behavior in principle, if you gave a million motivated super-Einsteins 1000 years to think, do you seriously believe that they could not produce a theory of weird proteins never encountered before?
I also think we mean slightly different things by “bottlenecked by reason”, what I mean is something like “given a problem and your current resources, there exists an amount N of Reasoning ability that will make you able to solve the problem, for most problems we have today in the developed world”. The amount required for specific problems might be very large, and small increases below that might not overwhelm the noise and randomness of the world. So I don’t find it surprising that intelligent people have not completely taken over the world.