Comment by tripletao

> You end up with this miracle drug (supposedly!), but no understanding of why it works or access to the iteration that would lead to that understanding (and increase in confidence that it doesn't cause people to drop dead anyways).

That is literally how all drugs worked for almost all of human history--nature gave us the compound in the form of a plant or other natural product; a brave, stupid, or desperate human consumed it; and then we watched what happened and the survivors learned. It's obviously good to have more understanding (more survivors!), but even now we often don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Drugs_with_unknown_me...

Most human endeavors are empirically grounded--we think an action will succeed not because we understand exactly why, but because it succeeded many times before. Math and CS are the weird exceptions, and the intuition that people with that background have for other fields is often bad.