Comment by utopiah
5 days ago
See what I replied just earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47011884 namely the different regimes, within paradigm versus challenging it by going back to first principles. The ability to notice something is off beyond "just" assembling existing pieces, to backtrack within the process when failures get too many and actually understand the relationship is precisely different.
So I don’t really see why this would be a difference in kind. We’re effectively just talking about how high up the stack we’re attempting to brute force solutions, right?
How many people have tried to figure out a new maths, a GUT in physics, a more perfect human language (Esperanto for ex.) or programming language, only to fail in the vast majority of their attempts?
Do we think that anything but the majority of the attempts at a paradigm shift will end in failure?
If the majority end in failure, how is that not the same brute force methodology (brute force doesn’t mean you can’t respond to feedback from your failed experiments or from failures in the prevailing paradigms, I take it to just fundamentally mean trying “new” things with tools and information available to you, with the majority of attempts ending in failure, until something clicks, or doesn’t and you give up).