2min snip

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EP 192 David Krakauer on Science, Complexity and AI

The Jim Rutt Show

NOTE

The Importance of Bandwidth Limitations in Scientific Revolutions

The history of science is characterized by constraints and limitations, not by excess power. Bandwidth limitations play a crucial role in scientific revolutions and creative breakthroughs by forcing the phenomenon into simpler causal relationships. For instance, if historical figures like Taiko Brahe had access to modern computing power, they may not have made groundbreaking discoveries like Kepler's laws or Newton's inverse square law. Providing more computing power and data to humans might hinder progress, suggesting that constraints and limitations drive human invention forward.

00:00
Speaker 2
It's interesting that this raises this again, this question that I've obsessed over, which is the importance of bandwidth limitation and constraints in scientific revolutions and creative breakthroughs. In other words, if you look at the history of science carefully, it's a history of constraint. It's not a history of excess power. I mean, I've written about this a lot, that if you gave, if we could travel back in a time machine and give Taiko Brahe, massive computing power and telescopes, he would never have hired Kepler, right? Because Kepler was his calculator, because Taiko Brahe wasn't very good at maths, good observation. And similarly, and Kepler then had Kepler's laws, and Newton comes along and says, that's a bit complicated and phenomenological. Let's come up with the inverse square law. And on and on, it goes, right?
Speaker 1
It's funny, I actually have a whole page of notes on that for this conversation. Taiko Brahe, Kepler and Newton, and how that's an example
Speaker 2
of... It's an example of bottlenecking of the phenomenon into increasingly simple sets of causal relationships and constraints. And my point is that that's the history of human invention. And if you did it the other way round, is that you gave more computing power and more data to humans, we'd still be in the stone age. And I think that I am curious about that. I'll
Speaker 1
say you're saying that if we had the ability to coarse-grained planetary motions, we would never have bothered to learn Newton's laws.
Speaker 2
Exactly.

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