Yeah, it’s clear I wasn’t precise enough in outlining what exactly I meant in the post / describing the edge cases. In particular, I should’ve addressed the ways by which you can gather information about an environment structure in realistic domains where that structure is occluded.
To roughly address that specific point: You don’t actually need to build full-scale rocket prototypes to get enough information about the rocket-design domain to build a rocket right on the first try. You can try low-scale experiments, and experiments that don’t involve “rockets” at all, to figure out the physical laws governing everything rocket-related. You don’t need to build anything even similar to rockets, except in a very abstract sense, to gather all that data.
It’s not done this way in practice because it’s severely cost-ineffective in most cases, but it’s doable. Just an extrapolation of the same principle by which it can occur to us to build a “rocket prototype” at all, instead of all inventions happening because people perturb matter completely at random until hitting on a design that works.
the laws of physics dictate that we can only know things up to a limited precision
In these cases technology is straight-up impossible. If the environment structure is such that only things up to a limited precision work, then there’s no way to build a technology that goes beyond that level of precision, by trial-and-error or otherwise.
This specific limitation is not about whether you need LPE or not; it’s about what kinds of design are possible at all.
I think this is a strawman of LPE
I don’t think it is, I don’t think it’s even a weak man. I concur that there’s a “sliding scale” of “LPE is crucial”, and I should’ve addressed that in the introductory part.
I don’t think my arguments address only the weak version of the argument, however. My impression is that a lot of people have “practical experience” and “the need to know the environment structure” intermixed in their minds, which confuses their intuitions. The extent of the intermixing is what determines the “severity” of their position. I’d attempted to address what seems to me like the root cause: that practical experience is only useful inasmuch as it uncovers the environment structure.
Yeah, it’s clear I wasn’t precise enough in outlining what exactly I meant in the post / describing the edge cases. In particular, I should’ve addressed the ways by which you can gather information about an environment structure in realistic domains where that structure is occluded.
To roughly address that specific point: You don’t actually need to build full-scale rocket prototypes to get enough information about the rocket-design domain to build a rocket right on the first try. You can try low-scale experiments, and experiments that don’t involve “rockets” at all, to figure out the physical laws governing everything rocket-related. You don’t need to build anything even similar to rockets, except in a very abstract sense, to gather all that data.
It’s not done this way in practice because it’s severely cost-ineffective in most cases, but it’s doable. Just an extrapolation of the same principle by which it can occur to us to build a “rocket prototype” at all, instead of all inventions happening because people perturb matter completely at random until hitting on a design that works.
In these cases technology is straight-up impossible. If the environment structure is such that only things up to a limited precision work, then there’s no way to build a technology that goes beyond that level of precision, by trial-and-error or otherwise.
This specific limitation is not about whether you need LPE or not; it’s about what kinds of design are possible at all.
I don’t think it is, I don’t think it’s even a weak man. I concur that there’s a “sliding scale” of “LPE is crucial”, and I should’ve addressed that in the introductory part.
I don’t think my arguments address only the weak version of the argument, however. My impression is that a lot of people have “practical experience” and “the need to know the environment structure” intermixed in their minds, which confuses their intuitions. The extent of the intermixing is what determines the “severity” of their position. I’d attempted to address what seems to me like the root cause: that practical experience is only useful inasmuch as it uncovers the environment structure.