I've often wondered about this. My suspicion is that there is a limit to the complexity of mental models that humans can fluently manipulate and I think we're starting to bump into it in some cases.

I think we will eventually need a paradigm shift from science being built around human grokable models (e=mc^2) to external human manipulatable models (ie, large scale machine derived models that we can't actually grok but can use for analysis and engineering). I think we're already starting to see this - there are already mathematical proofs that are so large and complex (in the GB range) that they had to be found by automation and only other automation can verify them.

We have tons of numerical simulations in engineering. Light modulation alone, just 3-5 lenses with different qualities can occupy a modern processor for a few hours.

> ...strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Isn't most of this kind of just a matter of fitness, same as why birds become flightless on islands where there are no predators which demand flight to escape from? Basically, building anything more than a minimally-viable nest or a dam requires using energy that could be invested elsewhere to greater evolutionary advantage.

Humans have gone beyond because for as long as we can remember, we've always had vast, vast surpluses of energy, initially through the cooking of meat and agriculture, then via animal labour, and then finally via fossil fuels.

I love the analogy, but I think it flawed: the limits are practical and excess just adds risk.

On the flip side, nothing seems more exemplified by humanity than a zeal for doing a thing as big and grandiose as possible: for curiosity, for business, for art, or just for sheer vanity.

I don't think we've seen how far those will take us yet, even w/o improvements to the bottlenecks you suggest. I do agree that those "meta" fields matter and will make a huge difference.

> strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Probably because beavers and birds have made dams and nests the same way for the past 100 years, whereas humans in the same time have developed a bunch of tools and can specialize and distribute the fruits of their expertise without requiring others to be experts themselves.

Perhaps it's not true that on average we know more e.g. math now than we did 100 years ago, because there are so many more people. I believe we are nonetheless much better at teaching and learning now.

It's more than possible that all of this growth will be our downfall, and that that will regulate our growth, however.

Life span is hardly a limiting factor. It is known that most scientific breakthroughs were made by people in their twenties-early thirties.

what if you could extend that academic "prime" by 30 years or longer?

It would do little, I think. Not because people get less smart with age, but because with years they establish themselves in their field, and become more conservative and less willing to shake the status quo.

I normally buy into this sort of logic, but there's a fundamental difference. We experience the world in a way that recognizes beavers' and birds' limits, whereas they do not. We can modify ourselves and our environment in a way and changes our limits. Perhaps if the world is a simulation, then there are hard limits, as we are but bits in a computer so to speak, but even then it's not certain - we could become aware of the world outside the simulation and learn to manipulate it thought I/O mechanisms.

Average humans struggle with calculus because we have instructed average humans that calculus is hard. If we taught it to 12 year olds as a routine matter, average 12 year olds would know calculus.

You can teach smart (not average) 12 year olds the basic rules how to compute derivation or primitive function, but I doubt they are capable of distinguishing between, say, continuous and uniformly continuous function. Which is actually pretty important when trying to reason your way around calculus.

> strange to me how nobody questions why beavers only make damns a certain size, birds only make nests and don't go beyond that in complexity.

Unlike humans, beavers and most species of birds don't work cooperatively, which means they can't separate the workload needed for survival (e.g. one group hunts, one group builds dams, one group does childcare).