gwern comments on Paradigm shifts in forecasting - Less Wrong
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NFL not relevant to the real world? Would you like to elaborate?
Real-world problems are not a random sampling from all possible problems and there's plenty of structure to exploit, so invoking NFL in this context seems odd to me.
A real world competition isn't a random sample of anything. It's a selection of some problems, with some data. The performance of any algorithm will depend on fit to those problems, with those data.
My takeaways from the NFL theorems - the problems in the real world are some structured subset of all possible problems, and the performance of any generalizer for a problem will depend on fit to that problem.
That's not chopped liver.