Crossposted from substack.

As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry.

Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn’t actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem.

If we’re going to break our conditioning anyway, where do we start? How do you even come up with a new artificial sweetener? I’ve been wondering about this, because it’s not obvious to me how you would figure out what is sweet and what is not.

Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side:

I can’t imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking “surely they taste the same”. Most sweeteners were discovered in the 20th century, before high-throughput screening was available. So how did they proceed?

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oA23zoEjPnzqfHiCt/there-is-way-too-much-serendipity

Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker

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“There is way too much serendipity” by Malmesbury

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“There is way too much serendipity” by Malmesbury