Indeed, I think theorists tend to make mistakes of either deductive or inductive bias. They start out tacitly assuming that reality must be some slightly noisy instantiation of a mathematical theorem ... that their favorite equations are logically true and for some mucky reason or another we just observe them as being noisily true.

From the post above:

To assign more than 50% probability to the correct candidate from a pool of 100,000,000 possible hypotheses, you need at least 27 bits of evidence (or thereabouts).

... or you just need to be that one guy who made a wild and unjustified guess about where to assign more than 50 % of the probability (despite not having bits of evidence to support it) and then be lucky.

This is true even if you call your guess a "hunch" or "intuition".

Only if you make the further assumption that whatever process that generates hunches or intuition must be decision-theoretic. That may not be a bad assumption, but I'm not convinced it's accurate in human beings. From my own readings about Einstein, I think it's more likely that he over-asserted the relevance of differential geometry and justified the pursuit of a theory along those lines with what is essentially faith in the mathematics. I don't think it was a subconscious extension of integrated evidence at all. For every Einstein whose hunch focused on the right general field of mathematics, there were probably dozens or hundreds of other physicists who just thought that burgeoning algebraic topology was the ticket, or perhaps non-standard analysis was the ticket, or perhaps representation theory was the ticket.