alt Hacker NewsWe are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.
I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).
Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.
I won't argue against that at all. Someday we're going to have someone with Shakespeare's brilliance and modern foundations, and I can't wait to see what that looks like.
(And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully out of date with modern literature.)