Yeah, but I do actually think this paragraph is wrong on the existence of easy rules. It is a bit like saying: There are only the laws of fundamental physics, don’t bother with trying to find high level laws, you just have to do the hard work of learning to apply fundamental physics when you are trying to understand a pendulum or a hot gas. Or biology.
Similarly, for induction there are actually easy rules applicable to certain domains of interest. Like Laplace’s rule of succession, which assumes random i.i.d. sampling. Which implies the sample distribution tends to resemble the population distribution. The same assumption is made by supervised learning about the training distribution, which works very well in many cases. There are other examples like the Lindy effect (mentioned in another comment) and various popular models in statistics. Induction heads also come to mind.
Even if there is just one, complex, fully general method applicable to science or induction, there may still exist “easy” specialized methods, with applicability restricted to a certain domain.
Yeah, but I do actually think this paragraph is wrong on the existence of easy rules. It is a bit like saying: There are only the laws of fundamental physics, don’t bother with trying to find high level laws, you just have to do the hard work of learning to apply fundamental physics when you are trying to understand a pendulum or a hot gas. Or biology.
Similarly, for induction there are actually easy rules applicable to certain domains of interest. Like Laplace’s rule of succession, which assumes random i.i.d. sampling. Which implies the sample distribution tends to resemble the population distribution. The same assumption is made by supervised learning about the training distribution, which works very well in many cases. There are other examples like the Lindy effect (mentioned in another comment) and various popular models in statistics. Induction heads also come to mind.
Even if there is just one, complex, fully general method applicable to science or induction, there may still exist “easy” specialized methods, with applicability restricted to a certain domain.