Very surprised that Emmy is not treated as an agent driven by a (predictive) model of causal relationships. How else could an embodied agent possibly function? Also surprised that Pearl's seminal work on Causality (incl. Counterfactuals) is not cited.
Maybe it's not a law of straight lines, its a law of exponentially diminishing returns, and maybe it applies to any scientific endeavour. What we are doing in science is developing mathematical representations of reality. The reality doesn't change, but our representations of it become ever more accurate, in an asymptotic fashion. What about Physics? In 2500 years we go from naive folk physics to Democritus, to Ptolemy, Galileo and Copernicus, to Newton, then Clerk Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger, Feynman and then the Standard Model, at every sta... (read more)