alt Hacker NewsLogic would dictate that medicine should be pragmatic and accept working cures that aren't understood.
If people had to understand everything that worked, most people could not really engage with anything.
If the requirement is just that one human, somewhere, understand it--how is that different from AI?
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Now I’m even more confused, perhaps we are in agreement. My position is that there already exists many such medications that no one knows how it works. It also used to be the default way medicine worked. Lots of things that work were found though observation of trial and error.
My position is that Tao is not only wrong on this but his example makes the opposite case.
Plenty of medicine... Not a single human on earth knows how they work. Now what?
Initial discovery in medicine is largely "try and see what seems to work". But there are many reasons why scientific inquiry just doesn't stop there and also seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms. For example, a naturally occurring product may be too difficult to harvest on a large scale. Or, a sample might not be sufficiently representative to uncover potentially deadly side effects or drug interactions. Humans are fundamentally unsatisfied to take everything purely on faith.