Alex_U comments on Friedman's "Prediction vs. Explanation" - Less Wrong
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Comments (79)
Scientist 2's theory is more susceptible to over-fitting of the data; we have no reason to believe it's particularly generalizable. His theory could, in essence, simply be restating the known results and then giving a more or less random prediction for the next one. Let's make it 100,000 trials rather than 20 (and say that Scientist A has based his yet-to-be-falsified theory off the first 50,000 trials), and stipulate that Scientist 2 is a neural network -- then the answer seems clear.