Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eliezer’s short story “That Alien Message” providing a convincing argument that humans are cognitively limited, not data-limited, through the device of a fictional world where people think faster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien... > Yes. There is. The theoretical limit is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypothes…
Regarding "Alien Message", I don't find that story particularly convincing. I think it's muddled and contrived. The basic issue is that we have to deduce stuff about the world we live in, using resources from the world we live in. In the story, the data bandwidth is contrived to be insanely smaller than the compute bandwidth, but that's not realistic. In reality, we are surrounded by chaotic physical systems that ope…
It may very well be true that you could cure cancer even faster or more cheaply with more experimental data, but that's irrelevant to the claim that more experimental data is necessary.
It may also be the case that there's no "shortcut" to simulating a human body well enough to test drugs against a simulated tumor faster than real time—that is, that you need to have enough memory to track every simulated atom. (The success of AlphaFold suggests that this is not the case, as does the ability of humans to survive things like electric shocks, but let's be conservative.) But a human body only contains on the order of 10²⁴ atoms, so you can just build a computer with 10²⁸ words of memory, and processing power to match. It might be millions of times larger than a human body, but that's okay; there's plenty of mass out there to turn into computronium. It doesn't make it physically unrealizable.
Relatedly, you may be interested in seeing Mr. Rogers confronting the paperclip maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-zJ1spML5c