Paul_Gowder2 comments on Friedman's "Prediction vs. Explanation" - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 September 2008 06:15AM

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Comment author: Paul_Gowder2 29 September 2008 06:44:00AM 1 point [-]

I rather like the 3rd answer on his blog (Doug D's). A slight elaboration on that -- one virtue of a scientific theory is its generality, and prediction is a better way of determining generality than explanation -- demanding predictive power from a theory excludes ad hoc theories of the sort Doug D mentioned, that do nothing more than re-state the data. This reasoning, note, does not require any math. :-)