Newton focused on forces and gravity. Later physicists generalized newtonian mechanics, coming up with formalisms for expressing a host of different problems using a common approach (Lagrangian mechanics with generalized coordinates). They weren't losing precision or sacrificing any power to anticipate reality by having an insight that many apparently different problems can be looked at as being essentially the same problem. A cylinder accellerating down a ramp as it rolls is the same problem as a satellite orbiting the L5 lagrangian point. Another unification was Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics, which unified and linked a large number of earlier, more focused understandings (e.g. Ampere's law, Coulomb's law, the Biot-Savart law).

One more example: a physics-trained researcher studying the dynamic topology of the internet recognized a mathematical similarity between the dynamics of the network and the physics of bosons, and realized that the phenomenon of Google's huge connectedness is, in a very real sense, following the same mathematics as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Eliezer's post seemed to denigrate people's interest in finding such connections and generalizations. Or did I miss the point? Are these sorts of generalizations not the kind he was referring to?