Comment by virgildotcodes

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).