I would say the IAS is one, as are other pure research institutes like Perimeter.
I would also say that a deep understanding isn’t usually necessary to make progress in many fields of human endeavor. Fields like engineering work on the basis of empiricism — theoretical understanding usually comes later. I could be all wrong here but my gut feeling is that the majority of great breakthroughs in engineering have come through tinkering and luck rather than a principled application of science — the latter is used more for refining the execution.
Even in recent times, neural network models have been shown to work without any deep understanding apart from the basics. It’s only recently that a lot of new theory have come out.
Deep understanding is a worthy goal in order to deconstruct things to learn how to make them fundamentally better or to build a foundation for further progress.
But as humans, we do very well surviving in a world that we largely do not deeply understand for the most part — I’d argue we are able to do so through heuristics (see Gigerenzer). We definitely should not let the lack of deep understanding prevent us from taking the initiative to do things.
I would also say that a deep understanding isn’t usually necessary to make progress in many fields of human endeavor. Fields like engineering work on the basis of empiricism — theoretical understanding usually comes later. I could be all wrong here but my gut feeling is that the majority of great breakthroughs in engineering have come through tinkering and luck rather than a principled application of science — the latter is used more for refining the execution.
Even in recent times, neural network models have been shown to work without any deep understanding apart from the basics. It’s only recently that a lot of new theory have come out.
Deep understanding is a worthy goal in order to deconstruct things to learn how to make them fundamentally better or to build a foundation for further progress.
But as humans, we do very well surviving in a world that we largely do not deeply understand for the most part — I’d argue we are able to do so through heuristics (see Gigerenzer). We definitely should not let the lack of deep understanding prevent us from taking the initiative to do things.