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sketerpot comments on What would you do if blood glucose theory of willpower was true? - Less Wrong
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The general idea behind Amdahl's law is that improving one thing may cause other things to be the limiting factor. The discovery that we could prevent scurvy just by getting enough vitamin C was great, and it all-but-eliminated scurvy-related problems from our lives, but it doesn't do much for other problems, like hurricanes, alcoholism, and monkey gangs. I personally would love to have a magic bullet that would prevent me from ever stubbing my toe. It wouldn't solve all our problems, but I have yet to find anybody, even masochists who get off on severe pain, who wants to continue getting stubbed toes. Amdahl's law isn't something you can get away from, but it's something you can work with.
Gustafson's law, which you linked to, isn't a rebuttal to Amdahl's law -- more like an addendum. If you have a really good solution to one problem, you can sometimes recast other problems in terms of it. If we ever get our shit together and start churning out Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (PDF) in bulk, then it would do more than solve our electricity woes. We could take some other problems -- not enough fertilizer, shortages of fresh water, oil supply problems -- and recast those in a form that we can solve with LFTRs. The high temperatures from LFTRs can make ammonia, synthetic fuels for internal combustion engines, and fresh water. One solution becomes many solutions.
I bought these shoes with reinforced toes. They're some sort of composite material rather than steel, so security checkpoints don't flip out too much, and no laces so they're easy to put on. Carolina makes 'em, for construction workers I think, but I wear them pretty much all the time, unless I'm sleeping or sitting in one place for hours. The only significant drawback I can think of is that eventually sweat accumulates. I suppose fashion might also be a problem, but valuing fashion over practicalities like mobility seems like a bad sign.
People have very strongly biased view against existence of magic bullets - most of the worst problem we historically had had been solved with a magic bullet. However - because the magic bullet solved them so well, the problems don't seem to have ever been that bad from today's perspective, and therefore magic bullets seem much less significant than they were.
An average person in let's say Medieval Europe's had biggest problem like:
If you start from a list of most serious problems, you'll see.
"Modern state" hardly seems simple and monolithic enough to be considered a magic bullet.
I'll leave it up to historians to figure out which part of modern state package caused this, yet the facts are - these problems existed since time immemorial, were some of the most severe ones, and are totally solved now.
I certainly agree that the situation has improved, but I'm not sure I'd call warfare, raids, and banditry 'totally solved.' Muggings, rape, burglary and riots still happen sometimes in civilized parts of the world. It's not just some mysterious, unpleasant thing from the increasingly distant past, like diptheria or smallpox or scurvy.
You're right Strange7, they're not totally solved. However I think taw's point has some merit. While the "Magic Bullet" didn't completely solve it's problem, it did ameliorate them to a huge degree. For example pre and post genetic-engineering farming is massively different... over 2 times as good. Doing the same for willpower would change society.
I think "people" needs qualification here. I regularly encounter people who think such and such a discovery is going to be a magic bullet to cure cancer, or allow FTL travel, or some other major breakthrough (but those two most of all, I think.) So far, they've always been wrong, but that doesn't stop people writing articles on how this not-even-replicated finding is going to be the one to revolutionize our world forever.
Many people become biased against the idea of magic bullets because so many other people aren't, and so they're exposed to numerous prospective magic bullets, none of which actually work.
In practice, things that aren't magic bullets can't usually be fit enough symbiotic memes to overcome the noise in memetic evolution.
Thank you - this is the most insightful thing I've heard today.