Comment by tpoacher

2 years ago

I interpret "highly improbable" here as referring to a model's "prior probability" before seeing the data.

It's kinda like accusing chatGPT explanations as p-hacking rather than truly generalisable insights based on plausibility and generalised predictive value.

Another way to interpret this is via the "It's the theory that determines what can be observed, not the other way round" adage (supposedly an Einstein quote). ChatGPT is fitting theories that are highly probable within its established universe of discourse, in that these are based on how it already interprets these observations. Theories that would require reinterpretation of the universe of discourse, with observations emerging or being interpreted under a different light, is simply not something that ChatGPT can do, and thus these theories would be given very low probability given the data. In other words, unlike model inference, theory generation is a forward process, not a posterior one.