Dwarkesh Patel

And then a few years later, he gets Brahe's data.

And it's only after 20 years of just trying random things that he gets this empirical regularity.

And so it actually feels closer to Brahe's data is analogous to

some massive data bank of simulations and then he now now that you've got the data you can keep trying random things but if it wasn't kepler would be out there just writing books about harmonics and platonic objects and there would be nothing to actually verify against

But maybe to ask the question about the analogy more explicitly,

Does this analogy make sense to if we have, you know, in the future we'll have smarter and smarter AIs and we'll have millions of them and then they can go out and hunt for all these empirical regularities.

It sounds like you don't think the bottleneck in science is finding more things that are for each given field their equivalent of the third law of planetary motion so that then later on somebody can say, oh, we need a way to explain this.

Let's work out the math.

Here's the inverse square law of gravity.

Yeah.

So I think there is this incredibly interesting question of we have billions of AI scientists.

Not only how do you gauge which ones are real progress, but how do you, I mean, this is actually a question that human scientists had to face and we've solved somehow.

And I actually am not sure how we solve this, but in any given field,

let's say in the 1940s and there's, if you're at Bell Labs or if you're just generally trying to, there's these new technologies coming out, pulse code modulation, basically how do you transfer signals?

How do you digitize signals?

How do you transfer them over analog wires?

And then, but there's like all these papers about the engineering constraints there and the details.

And then there's one, which is like, comes up with the idea of the bit, which has implications across many different fields.

And you need some system which can then look at that and say, okay, we need to apply this to probability.

We need to apply this to computer science, et cetera.