Speaking as an (ex-)scientist, the fact that natural latents exist, can be found, and are well defined and basically unique for a systems feels… blindingly obvious: we do this all the time. But I gather we never previously had a description of their necessary properties in term of Bayes nets before, nor a proof of in what sense they are unique. I don’t think I was ever very worried that AI was going to discover an entirely different ontology for physics so different that pressure or temperature were not well-defined abstractions represented in it, but I also didn’t have a uniqueness proof demonstrating that fact, and with the fate of the human race potentially on the line, that’s a reassuring thing to have. Physicists often have a tendency to take on trust things that any mathematician would be aghast at, just because they seem to work in practice. [But then, neither have I ever figured out why anyone thinks the diamond-maximization problem is hard, as opposed to just tedious (you just have to list your purity specifications in isotopic and crystalographic terms, and then put it inside a standard causal wrapper).]
Speaking as an (ex-)scientist, the fact that natural latents exist, can be found, and are well defined and basically unique for a systems feels… blindingly obvious: we do this all the time. But I gather we never previously had a description of their necessary properties in term of Bayes nets before, nor a proof of in what sense they are unique. I don’t think I was ever very worried that AI was going to discover an entirely different ontology for physics so different that pressure or temperature were not well-defined abstractions represented in it, but I also didn’t have a uniqueness proof demonstrating that fact, and with the fate of the human race potentially on the line, that’s a reassuring thing to have. Physicists often have a tendency to take on trust things that any mathematician would be aghast at, just because they seem to work in practice. [But then, neither have I ever figured out why anyone thinks the diamond-maximization problem is hard, as opposed to just tedious (you just have to list your purity specifications in isotopic and crystalographic terms, and then put it inside a standard causal wrapper).]