You can send DNA sequences to businesses right now that will manufacture the proteins that those sequences encode
Have you ever tried this ? I have, it comes with loads of *s
Developing a good theory of proteins seems pretty much a pure-Reason problem
Under the assumption that we know all there is about proteins, which I’ve seen no claims of made by anyone. Current knowledge is limited and in-vitro, and doesn’t generalize to “weird” families of proteins”.
“Protein-based nanotechnology” requires:
weird proteins with properties not encountered yet
complex in-vivo behavior, i.e. where we still have no clue about basically anything, since you can’t crystalize a protein to tell how it’s folding, those nice animation you saw on youtube, I’m afraid, are pure speculation
So no, not really, you can maybe get a tomato to be a bit spicy, I saw a stream where one of the most intelligent and applied biology-focused polymath I ever saw (Though Emporium) tried to figure out if there was a theoretical way to do it and gave up after 30 minutes.
You can get stuff to glow, that too, and it can be really useful, but we’ve been doing that for 200+ years.
You can make money by simply choosing a good product on Alibaba, making a website that appeals to people, using good marketing tactics and drop-shipping, no need for any physical interaction. The only thing you need is a good theory of consumer psychology. That seems like an almost-pure-Reason problem.
It seems completely obvious to me that reason is by far the dominant bottleneck in obtaining control over the material world.
I think the thing you fail to understand here is randomness, chance.
You think that “Ok, this requires little physical labour, so 100% of it is thinking” but you fail to grasp even the possibility that there could be things where there is not enough information for reason to be useful, or even worst, that almost everything falls into that category.
If I chose 1,000,000 random products from alibab and resell them on amazon at 3x, I’m bound to hit gold.
But if I hit gold with 1⁄100 products, I’m still, on the whole, losing 98% of my investment.
You think “but I know a guy that sold X and he chose X based on reason and he made 3x his money back”
And yes, yes you might, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of another 99 guys you don’t know of that tried the same thing and lost because they usually don’t make internet videos telling you about it.
Granted, I’m being coy here, realistically the way e.g. reselling works is on a “huge risk of collapse” model (most things make back 1.1x but you’re always 1x deep into the thing you are buying not coming through, not being in demand or otherwise not facilitating the further sale), but the above model is easier to understand.
And again, the important thing here is that “will X resell on amazon” can be something that is literally impossible to figure out without buying “X” and trying to sell it on amazon.
And “will 10X resell on amazon” and “will 100X resell on amazon” are, similarly, no the same question, there’s some similarity between them, but figuring out how that number before “X” scales might in itself only be determinable by experiments.
***
Then again, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in any of those fields, but neither are you, and the thing that I don’t get is why you are so certain that “reason” is the main bottleneck when in any given field, the actual experts seem to be clamoring for more experiments, more, better labs… and smart grad students go for a dime a dozen.
Or, forget the idea of consensus, who’s to say what the consensus is. But why assume you can see the bottleneck at all? Why not think “I have no idea what the bottleneck is”? To be perfectly fair, if you queried me for long enough, that’s probably the answer I’d give.
The perspective you expose paints a world that makes no sense, where a deep conspiracy has to be at play for the most intelligent people not to have 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.
Have you ever tried this ? I have, it comes with loads of *s
Under the assumption that we know all there is about proteins, which I’ve seen no claims of made by anyone. Current knowledge is limited and in-vitro, and doesn’t generalize to “weird” families of proteins”.
“Protein-based nanotechnology” requires:
weird proteins with properties not encountered yet
complex in-vivo behavior, i.e. where we still have no clue about basically anything, since you can’t crystalize a protein to tell how it’s folding, those nice animation you saw on youtube, I’m afraid, are pure speculation
So no, not really, you can maybe get a tomato to be a bit spicy, I saw a stream where one of the most intelligent and applied biology-focused polymath I ever saw (Though Emporium) tried to figure out if there was a theoretical way to do it and gave up after 30 minutes.
You can get stuff to glow, that too, and it can be really useful, but we’ve been doing that for 200+ years.
I think the thing you fail to understand here is randomness, chance.
You think that “Ok, this requires little physical labour, so 100% of it is thinking” but you fail to grasp even the possibility that there could be things where there is not enough information for reason to be useful, or even worst, that almost everything falls into that category.
If I chose 1,000,000 random products from alibab and resell them on amazon at 3x, I’m bound to hit gold.
But if I hit gold with 1⁄100 products, I’m still, on the whole, losing 98% of my investment.
You think “but I know a guy that sold X and he chose X based on reason and he made 3x his money back”
And yes, yes you might, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of another 99 guys you don’t know of that tried the same thing and lost because they usually don’t make internet videos telling you about it.
Granted, I’m being coy here, realistically the way e.g. reselling works is on a “huge risk of collapse” model (most things make back 1.1x but you’re always 1x deep into the thing you are buying not coming through, not being in demand or otherwise not facilitating the further sale), but the above model is easier to understand.
And again, the important thing here is that “will X resell on amazon” can be something that is literally impossible to figure out without buying “X” and trying to sell it on amazon.
And “will 10X resell on amazon” and “will 100X resell on amazon” are, similarly, no the same question, there’s some similarity between them, but figuring out how that number before “X” scales might in itself only be determinable by experiments.
***
Then again, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in any of those fields, but neither are you, and the thing that I don’t get is why you are so certain that “reason” is the main bottleneck when in any given field, the actual experts seem to be clamoring for more experiments, more, better labs… and smart grad students go for a dime a dozen.
Or, forget the idea of consensus, who’s to say what the consensus is. But why assume you can see the bottleneck at all? Why not think “I have no idea what the bottleneck is”? To be perfectly fair, if you queried me for long enough, that’s probably the answer I’d give.
The perspective you expose paints a world that makes no sense, where a deep conspiracy has to be at play for the most intelligent people not to have 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.