But I don’t view this as a position of total epistemic helplessness—it’s clear that there has been a lot of progress over the last 40 years to the extent that we should be more than halfway there.
Those are not incompatible. Suppose that you vaguely feel that a whole set of independent conceptual insights is missing, and that some of them will only be reachable after some previous ones have been discovered; e. g. you need to go A→B→C. Then the expected time until the problem is solved is the sum of the expected wait-times TA+TB+TC, and if you observe A and B being solved, it shortens to TC.
I think that checks out intuitively. We can very roughly gauge how “mature” a field is, and therefore, how much ground there’s likely to cover.
Those are not incompatible. Suppose that you vaguely feel that a whole set of independent conceptual insights is missing, and that some of them will only be reachable after some previous ones have been discovered; e. g. you need to go A→B→C. Then the expected time until the problem is solved is the sum of the expected wait-times TA+TB+TC, and if you observe A and B being solved, it shortens to TC.
I think that checks out intuitively. We can very roughly gauge how “mature” a field is, and therefore, how much ground there’s likely to cover.
Yes, I agree