many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.

iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.

high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.

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suddenlybananas 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well I guess who gives a shit about knowledge

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mlazos 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

Ive been thinking about this a a lot, like now if LLMs can just try a bunch of things, you can just try them all now. Are there some applications where we can just brute force and test at scale and no longer need to understand? Where understanding is now in essence that it “works” and passes our acceptance tests.

	▲	suddenlybananas 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I give a shit about knowledge! I think it's good entirely for its own sake.