> For truly difficult problems, it’s entirely possible that humans are simply incapable of comprehending why a solution is true. But ultimately the practical value of applying that solution to the real world is going to eclipse our need to understand it.
This is hardly new or novel, you’ve just described huge chunks of existing engineering disciplines. There is still no complete model that explains why airplane wings work, there are lots of very useful models, but all of them have fundamental flaws where their behaviour completely breaks down in certain very possible scenarios. Notably scenarios where airplane wings don’t spontaneously either stop working or explode.
We also built the entire commercial airliner system decades before we even had computers capable of doing the aerodynamic analysis of airplanes, but none of that prevented us from creating huge engineering disciplines around the empirical data we did have, and slowly chip away at the underlying theories as maths and computing improved over time.
So we’ve always lived in a world where we extract value from systems we fundamentally don’t understand. But that’s never stopped us from working to understand them anyway, and deriving even further value from that improved understanding.
This is hardly new or novel, you’ve just described huge chunks of existing engineering disciplines. There is still no complete model that explains why airplane wings work, there are lots of very useful models, but all of them have fundamental flaws where their behaviour completely breaks down in certain very possible scenarios. Notably scenarios where airplane wings don’t spontaneously either stop working or explode.
We also built the entire commercial airliner system decades before we even had computers capable of doing the aerodynamic analysis of airplanes, but none of that prevented us from creating huge engineering disciplines around the empirical data we did have, and slowly chip away at the underlying theories as maths and computing improved over time.
So we’ve always lived in a world where we extract value from systems we fundamentally don’t understand. But that’s never stopped us from working to understand them anyway, and deriving even further value from that improved understanding.