Maybe an advantage of an explanatory theory is in revealing more of the "black box", giving more ways to check the theory. (But I'm not sure how this could apply to Newton's gravity, since the only observations were outcomes. And no plausible way to "experiment".)
> If it wasn't for the ancients stumbling and fumbling in the dark for millennia
Is there any evidence that the epicyclic models helped scientific understanding, even indirectly? Later theories didn't seem to build on it. I wonder if it actually detoured understanding, with its misleadingly impressive accuracy, so that understanding would have progressed more quickly without it.
Thinking of pg's "great work" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550615): to be the Newton of neural nets would seem the most ambitious aspiration of our times. But it took a bunch of geniuses just to get to Newton... and it seems an even harder problem than planetary motion.
Though a difference is neural nets are based on actual neurons (loosely!).
It's looking like working human-level AI will precede understanding... perhaps by those 2000 years?
Maybe an advantage of an explanatory theory is in revealing more of the "black box", giving more ways to check the theory. (But I'm not sure how this could apply to Newton's gravity, since the only observations were outcomes. And no plausible way to "experiment".)
> If it wasn't for the ancients stumbling and fumbling in the dark for millennia
Is there any evidence that the epicyclic models helped scientific understanding, even indirectly? Later theories didn't seem to build on it. I wonder if it actually detoured understanding, with its misleadingly impressive accuracy, so that understanding would have progressed more quickly without it.
Thinking of pg's "great work" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550615): to be the Newton of neural nets would seem the most ambitious aspiration of our times. But it took a bunch of geniuses just to get to Newton... and it seems an even harder problem than planetary motion. Though a difference is neural nets are based on actual neurons (loosely!).
It's looking like working human-level AI will precede understanding... perhaps by those 2000 years?