Adam Brown

It best predicts the data with some loss minimization.

That's not always how new theories, particularly revolutionary theories, come up.

There's this famous fact, even when they were moving from a geocentric...

worldview to a heliocentric worldview that that it was so beautiful the theory by the time they were finished with the epicycles i mean not beautiful it was so ornate uh by the time where these planets were moving around the sun but moving on epicycles that actually the data didn't any better fit the heliocentric worldview than the geocentric worldview especially since they didn't

properly understand the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

So it wasn't.

Why does one theory replace another?

One reason is obviously that it's more consistent with the data, but that's by no means the only theory.

And if you just optimize for being consistent with the data, you're going to end up with

If you optimize only for being consistent with the data, you're going to end up with epicycles.

You're not going to end up with some beautiful new conceptual thing.

Part of the reason people like these new theories is that even though they're maybe not better at matching the data, they are more beautiful.

And we'd have to teach...

And that's been a reliable guide in the history of science.

And we'd have to teach these LLMs beauty.

Well, we've sort of solved it.

I mean, we haven't solved it in the same way that if you have some new sort algorithm that you claim is faster than everybody else's sort algorithm, there doesn't need to be any dispute about that.

You can just run it and see.

Physics is not the same way.

It is definitely the case that there's a number of people who think they have great theories.