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There is no cure for blindness? What kind of blindness? Even a popular entertainer made news when curing 1,000 cataracts with a today's standard procedure. How

There is no cure for blindness? What kind of blindness? Even a popular entertainer made news when curing 1,000 cataracts with a today's standard procedure. How would cataracts be cured 500 years ago? Bloodletting? Very soon (10 years, 20, maybe more) we will be able to restore full eyesight, even regrow eyes [1], and beyond. But sure, cling to dusty metaphysics while sending messages at light speed across the entire planet with a detour in Low Earth Orbit using materials which were invented 116 years ago [2], it's your privilege. [1] "Researchers restore lost sight in mice, offering clues to reversing aging. But many hurdles remain before approach can be tried in people", https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-lost-sight-mice-offering-clues-reversing-aging https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-... [2] "In 1907 Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, meaning it contained no molecules found in nature.", https://www.sciencehistory.org/the-history-and-future-of-plastics#:~:text=In%201907%20Leo%20Baekeland%20invented%20Bakelite%2C%20the%20first%20fully%20synthetic%20plastic%2C%20meaning%20it%20contained%20no%20molecules%20found%20in%20nature https://www.sciencehistory.org/the-history-and-future-of-pla....

mejutoco 4y ago
> But sure, cling to dusty metaphysics while sending messages at light speed. I do not understand what you mean by dusty metaphysics. I am guessing you mean religion? I can criticize science without endorsing religion. It is not either or. If that is the case, I believe you read into my comment things I did not say. I already said science is great. At the same time, we hardly know anything. These are orthogonal. We are a bunch of apes on a rock in the middle of space. Replacing religion with science is what (one of the things) Nietzsche was talking about. What a better example, ironically, that not being able to criticize Science.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  In a funny way, by dusty metaphysics I actually meant the great Swiss philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Genealogy of Morals he has quotes such as "Science is not nearly independent…, in every respect it first needs a value-ideal, value-creating power, in whose service it can believe in itself,—science itself never creates values." [1] using the word wissenschaft for science, knowledge-making, translating literally the German word. The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. As for "hardly knowing anything", just looking at the front page of HN right now: we are discovering new water sources on the Moon [2], new primitive cells [3]. We are improving, however knowledge is not about totality (omni-scientia, as the religious terminology would put it). Even if we were to condense all the knowledge in one place, hoard it, it would only collapse into a black hole, our universe is rather limited. Knowledge is about principles: we will never again have to worry about the sun not rising tomorrow because we made the god of Sun angry (although we should worry that the Sun will evaporate Earth in a few billion years, so I suppose Nietzsche has his point [4]). [1] Two Genealogies of Human Values: Nietzsche Versus Edward O. Wilson on the Consilience of Philosophy, Science and Technology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6978441 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6978441 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565553 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537248 [4] 'Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.', 1873, F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer. > science itself never creates values I did not say I agree with Everything Nietzsche says. I disagree on that one. > The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. Why are we already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined? You state it as fact but do not justify it. The Hadron collider has not discovered many of the things people were hoping to. Mathematics optimism was demolished with Gödel. If anything, it feels like we need to put more and more effort to get less and less progress (diminishing returns). IMHO it is fine, what else can we do, but I don't think it is a situation to brag about. This naïve positivity that Science will solve all problems _is_ the cultural artifact of the Enlightenment. By now the optimism has faded. In 150 years no more illnesses? Who can believe that, if we are not all dead from the environment or nuclear war. But most importantly: > As for "hardly knowing anything", just looking at the front page of HN right now If instead of looking at hn we go to a hospital it will be obvious how little we know.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that. And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin. Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware. Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr... [2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315247960/nietzsche-science-thomas-brobjer-gregory-moore https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479... [3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-bd96725e49c9/Mendeleev-s_1869_periodic_table.png?lang=en-US https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-... [4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w

mejutoco 4y ago

> But sure, cling to dusty metaphysics while sending messages at light speed. I do not understand what you mean by dusty metaphysics. I am guessing you mean religion? I can criticize science without endorsing religion. It is not either or. If that is the case, I believe you read into my comment things I did not say. I already said science is great. At the same time, we hardly know anything. These are orthogonal. We are a bunch of apes on a rock in the middle of space. Replacing religion with science is what (one of the things) Nietzsche was talking about. What a better example, ironically, that not being able to criticize Science.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
In a funny way, by dusty metaphysics I actually meant the great Swiss philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Genealogy of Morals he has quotes such as "Science is not nearly independent…, in every respect it first needs a value-ideal, value-creating power, in whose service it can believe in itself,—science itself never creates values." [1] using the word wissenschaft for science, knowledge-making, translating literally the German word. The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. As for "hardly knowing anything", just looking at the front page of HN right now: we are discovering new water sources on the Moon [2], new primitive cells [3]. We are improving, however knowledge is not about totality (omni-scientia, as the religious terminology would put it). Even if we were to condense all the knowledge in one place, hoard it, it would only collapse into a black hole, our universe is rather limited. Knowledge is about principles: we will never again have to worry about the sun not rising tomorrow because we made the god of Sun angry (although we should worry that the Sun will evaporate Earth in a few billion years, so I suppose Nietzsche has his point [4]). [1] Two Genealogies of Human Values: Nietzsche Versus Edward O. Wilson on the Consilience of Philosophy, Science and Technology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6978441 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6978441 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565553 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35537248 [4] 'Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.', 1873, F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer. > science itself never creates values I did not say I agree with Everything Nietzsche says. I disagree on that one. > The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. Why are we already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined? You state it as fact but do not justify it. The Hadron collider has not discovered many of the things people were hoping to. Mathematics optimism was demolished with Gödel. If anything, it feels like we need to put more and more effort to get less and less progress (diminishing returns). IMHO it is fine, what else can we do, but I don't think it is a situation to brag about. This naïve positivity that Science will solve all problems _is_ the cultural artifact of the Enlightenment. By now the optimism has faded. In 150 years no more illnesses? Who can believe that, if we are not all dead from the environment or nuclear war. But most importantly: > As for "hardly knowing anything", just looking at the front page of HN right now If instead of looking at hn we go to a hospital it will be obvious how little we know.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that. And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin. Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware. Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr... [2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315247960/nietzsche-science-thomas-brobjer-gregory-moore https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479... [3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-bd96725e49c9/Mendeleev-s_1869_periodic_table.png?lang=en-US https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-... [4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w