Comment by theptip
20 hours ago
> Norvig confuses engineering for science
I don’t think Norvig is confused. He explicitly addresses this point right at the top of the article.
His argument is that successfully engineering a system using a statistical method provides some bits of evidence for the hypothesis that the system itself is statistical.
Which is obviously true, so long as we take care to weigh evidence properly.
> there's absolutely no reason to think that tells you anything scientific about the phenomenon you're modeling
No, this is not how evidence works. If you can accurately model a system with method X and you cannot come up with a model that works with method Y, you should think it’s more likely (but not certain) that X is the actual physical model.
And indeed modern cognitive science (see Predictive Processing) also has a bunch of evidence for the brain as a hierarchical predictor, rather than a rule engine.
To your points - planes are not model organisms of birds, but they do shed insight on the bounds that birds must obey, eg thrust-to-weight etc. And the sample efficiency point really needs to die. The human brain is born with an extremely complex prior baked in. An LLM begins pretraining with almost nothing (just a very simple architecture and a few simple algorithms like attention), and has to learn the basic architecture of cognition from scratch. A better baseline would be how many samples were processed by every animal in our genetic ancestry that had a brain, since brains existed.
> No, this is not how evidence works. If you can accurately model a system with method X and you cannot come up with a model that works with method Y, you should think it’s more likely (but not certain) that X is the actual physical model.
Could you expand on this point?
Try to model radioactive decay via a process other than statistical and you will almost certainly fail, since that is our best understanding of it.
I was also going to suggest coin flips, but it’s not quite the same… I think any chaotic system is generally best modeled that way, and if you cared about the effect the system has on other things, it’s unlikely you can do better since measuring the initial state will not be feasible.
Try to express it in anything but the language of stats you will fail because we haven't invented another language for it; we could but have no reason to with the ubiquitous nature of stats syntax and semantics
Math is not physics and physics is not math. Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics
That's the difference being highlighted here; stats are not evidence of gravity and electromagnetism; physical phenomena when materials influenced by those forces are relative to local gravity, electromagnetic fields are our evidence
Stats of 1960s demographics did not capture immutable physical phenomena because entropy-> generational churn -> those people are now dead
The languages do not matter; they're just to communicate some ground truth.
Shackling society to the past through careful statistical methods relative to finance and politics to avoid societal change is not a scientific conclusion; there's no reason to use 30-40 years ago as the center of our social universe
The concern with stats consumption is we walk away from a result as if its an immutable forever conclusion as we ignore that gravity and electromagnetism, etc have not stopped changing ground truth; past truths that no longer matter to our next choices