Theories are invariants. Invariants screen off large numbers of contingent facts. That’s why we have reference classes. A reference class is a collection of contingent factors such that we expect an invariant to hold, or know exactly* which contingent factors are present in which amounts such that we can correct for their contribution such that the remaining invariant holds.
*in practice you know this with some noise, even up to a large amount, what matters is that you can then propagate this through the model correctly such that you know how much noise your resultant answers are also subject to.
I don’t expect to be able to explain this to students.
Theories are invariants. Invariants screen off large numbers of contingent facts. That’s why we have reference classes. A reference class is a collection of contingent factors such that we expect an invariant to hold, or know exactly* which contingent factors are present in which amounts such that we can correct for their contribution such that the remaining invariant holds.
*in practice you know this with some noise, even up to a large amount, what matters is that you can then propagate this through the model correctly such that you know how much noise your resultant answers are also subject to.
I don’t expect to be able to explain this to students.