If the discussion is about gaining an increasing measure of understanding and an ability to control biological systems for particular purposes, sure, that certainly makes sense. And, yes, manufacturing when you look at it closely is really all about mitigating variation (randomness) with the understanding that everything is a trade-off. However, to stretch that into the idea of "eliminating randomness" in our lives is absolutely asking to be bitch-slapped by philosophers and scientists--- that's something that money-people like Thiel may need from time-to-time (its not a bad thing).

If you take the idea of "getting rid of randomness" to its logical conclusion, it boils down to making the world deterministic.

Does it make sense to pursue impossible goals? If not, does it make sense to philosophize about pursuing impossible goals?

It's basically just thermodynamics: if you're willing to spend enough energy, you can optimize the state an arbitrarily large system as you please.

Of course, the key words there are enough energy. It sounds like Thiel might be forgetting to account for what we want to optimize and how much effort we're willing to spend on it.

> if you're willing to spend enough energy, you can optimize the state an arbitrarily large system as you please

Define "optimize" and "system"?

"System" -- any bloody thing you care about, any collection of mass and energy.

"Optimize" -- to constrain the system to within a subset of its state-space. Or in other words, to make only some things happen rather than all other possible things.

Generally, as long as something is physically possible, you can spend some amount of energy to make it reasonably probable or unreasonably improbable. This may just be far more energy than you happen to have, or care to spend.

So how does the 'optimization' work? :)

I have no clue about physics, so I'm just curious.

It doesn't. It's really a deliberately vague term referring to any physical action designed to put the system in one state rather than another. A thermodynamically non-reversible action, you could say.

Alright. Well, we're talking about something that might be theoretically possible, but is impossible in practice. I don't think it matters.