What are you trying to argue for? I’m getting stuck on the oversimplified interpretation you give for the quote. In the real world, smart people such as Leibniz raised objections to Newton’s mechanics at the time, objections which sound vaguely Einsteinian and not dependent on lots of data. The “principle of sufficient reason” is about internal properties of the theory, similar to Einstein’s argument for each theory of relativity. (Leibniz’s argument could also be given a more Bayesian formulation, saying that if absolute position in space is meaningful, then a full description of the ‘initial state’ of the universe needs to contain additional complexity which has zero predictive value in order to specify that location.) Einstein, in the real world, expressed confidence in general relativity prior to experimental confirmation. What Eliezer is talking about seems different in degree, but not in kind.
What are you trying to argue for? I’m getting stuck on the oversimplified interpretation you give for the quote. In the real world, smart people such as Leibniz raised objections to Newton’s mechanics at the time, objections which sound vaguely Einsteinian and not dependent on lots of data. The “principle of sufficient reason” is about internal properties of the theory, similar to Einstein’s argument for each theory of relativity. (Leibniz’s argument could also be given a more Bayesian formulation, saying that if absolute position in space is meaningful, then a full description of the ‘initial state’ of the universe needs to contain additional complexity which has zero predictive value in order to specify that location.) Einstein, in the real world, expressed confidence in general relativity prior to experimental confirmation. What Eliezer is talking about seems different in degree, but not in kind.