It seems that between 1920 and 1970, there was much more progress in physics, computer science, biology, psychiatry, psychology, aerospace and space engineering, education than there was in the last fifty years. Something broke.
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Replying to @Plinz
From 0 to 80% is “easy”. To then expect to go 160% in the same is like lunacy.
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Replying to @HenkPoley
Are we still at 80%? It is much harder to build a train or a mile of subway than in 1970, or to fly to the moon, or to test a new psychiatric medication, or to get research funding for a new idea in foundational physics. At the same time academia seems full of ideological bs
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Replying to @MatMcGann @HenkPoley
I think Henk Poley believes that we have achieved 80% of what a human technological civilization can hope for. (My own guess is that we stalled at less than 5%, and pessimism is my second name.)
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Replying to @Plinz @MatMcGann
Let’s give an example of the idea. The theoretical max efficiency of solar panels is 42% (from the top of my head). Current commonly sold panels are about 19%. To expect more than 2x performance in an long or short term future is expecting the impossible.
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In a lot of the areas Joscha mentioned the easy things have been done. And we’re now sort of painting in the remaining area. Example: unless we are going to make a pill that rewires brain patterns, don’t expect much from psychiatric medication over what it already does.
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Another example, anything single-threaded in computer science will not get much faster with current silicon computers. If the data dependencies mean the algorithm will always be single threaded, bad luck, there are no miracles. https://m.imgur.com/a/frbo6AX
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Replying to @HenkPoley @MatMcGann
Our brain has relatively few threads and incredibly shitty reliability and speed, but offers distributed best effort computing that we don’t know how to mimic. We should be able to reduce energy consumption of CPUs by a factor of millions.
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In all your examples, we have mostly paradigms that were developed before the 1970ies and work after that was subparadigmatic, instead of creating something new when the old paradigm was exhausted.
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Replying to @Plinz @MatMcGann
“The easier things were done, why are the hard things not done” Well, because they are hard..
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