private_messaging comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong
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This happens, but the conclusion is different. No matter how many cases of an infinite-case conjecture I test, it's not going to be accepted as proof or even particularly valid evidence that the conjecture is true. The point of doing this is more to check if there are any easy counter-examples, or to figure out what's going on in greater detail, but then you go back and prove it.
That is evidence that a weaker conjecture (e.g. that the conjecture holds over some very huge range of numbers) is true.
And the proof verification can be seen as an empirical process. In fact it should be, given that proof verification is an experiment run on a physical machine which has limited reliability and a probability of error.