> Understanding reality makes our lives significantly better.
Of course on the whole understanding makes our lives better, but if you're asserting this for everything, it's probably some kind of a survival bias. The understandings that aren't really useful are often forgotten, while the useful ones are passed down through generations.
It's actually very easy to get caught in understanding niche topics that genuinely find very little application.
Is all potentiality that exists unlocked and harvested? Is science even looking in all the right places? Can a mind on science even care about such things (or better: to what degree do individual and a culture/society of minds on science have the ability to care (have non-constrained curiosity))?
In my experience, something about the mind makes it think it is able to know the correct answer to these questions, which is a remarkable but little studied phenomenon.
Of course on the whole understanding makes our lives better, but if you're asserting this for everything, it's probably some kind of a survival bias. The understandings that aren't really useful are often forgotten, while the useful ones are passed down through generations.
It's actually very easy to get caught in understanding niche topics that genuinely find very little application.