I think you shouldn’t be too surprised to make meaningful headway on theoretically interesting questions, even those which will plausibly be important. It seems like in theoretical research today things are still developing reasonably rapidly, and the ratio between plausibly important problems and human capital is very large.

I agree with this. Luke seems to be making a much stronger claim than the above, though.

It seems like you are applying the argument: “We know that humans can do X, so why do you think that X is an important problem?”

I agree that that would be a bad argument. That was not the argument I intended to make, though I can see why it has been interpreted that way and I should have put more effort into explaining myself. I am rather saying that human reasoning looks so far away from even getting close to running into issues with Godel / Lob, that it seems like a rather abstruse starting point for investigation.

The rest of your comment seems most easily discussed in person, so I'll do that and hopefully we'll remember to update the thread with our conclusion.