(...) the term technical is a red flag for me, as it is many times used not for the routine business of implementing ideas but for the parts, ideas and all, which are just hard to understand and many times contain the main novelties.
- Saharon Shelah
As a true-born Dutchman I endorse Crocker's rules.
For my most of my writing see my short-forms (new shortform, old shortform)
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it's the mystery of love, John
The people require it, sir.
Social sciences suffer from social drsirability bias, very noisy data, difficult to formalize concepts/abstractions too leaky, and difficulties with controls. Additionally, many people have strong (and often false) intuitions about social reality overriding scientific judgement.
One could call the social world more "complex" than physical realm but "complex" is a tricky word... A human is arguably more complex than an atom; yet the models that social scientists use are much less complex than used by physicists.
Although I wouldn't dispute the stats that you are citing here, John, I would guess these might be downstream from above difficulties.
I asked a well-known string theorist about the fabled 10^500 vacua and asked him whether he worried that this would make string theory a vacuous theory since a theory that fits anything fits nothing. He replied ' no, no the 10^500 'swampland' is a great achievement of string theory - you see... all other theories have infinitely many adjustable parameters'. He was saying string theory was about ~1500 bits away from the theory of everything but infinitely ahead of its competitors.
Diabolical.
Much ink has been spilled on the scientific merits and demerits of string theory and its competitors. The educated reader will recognize that this all this and more is of course, once again, solved by UDASSA.
For those who might not have noticed Dan's clever double entendre: (Khovanov) homology is literally about counting/measuring holes in weird high-dimensional spaces - designing a new homology theory is in a very real sense about looking for holes that are not (yet) there.
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1I watched the video. It doesnt seem to say that China is behind in machine tooling - rather the opposite: prices are falling, capacity is increasing, new technology is rapidly adopted.
'taste', ' mathematical beauty', ' interesting to mathematicians' aren't arbitrary markers but reflect a deeper underlying structure that is, I believe, ultimately formalizable.
It does not seem unlikely to me at all that it will be possible to mathematically describe those true statements that are moreover of particular beauty or likely interest to mathematicians (human, artificial or alien).
The Godel speedup story is an interesting point. I haven't thought deeply enough about this but IIRC the original ARC heuristic arguments has several sections on this and related topics. You might want to consult there.