It’s one of those predictions where, if it’s false, then we’ve probably discovered something interesting—most likely some place where an organism is spending resources to do something useful which we haven’t understood yet.
… is also intended as a falsifiable prediction. Like, if we go look at the anomaly and there’s no new thing going on there, then that’s a very big strike against expected utility theory.
This particular type of fallback-prediction is a common one in general: we have some theory which makes predictions, but “there’s a phenomenon which breaks one of the modelling assumption in a way noncentral to the main theory” is a major way the predictions can fail. But then we expect to be able to go look and find the violation of that noncentral modelling assumption, which would itself yield some interesting information. If we don’t find such a violation, it’s a big strike against the theory.
This particular type of fallback-prediction is a common one in general: we have some theory which makes predictions, but “there’s a phenomenon which breaks one of the modelling assumption in a way noncentral to the main theory” is a major way the predictions can fail.
That’s a great way of framing it! And a great way of thinking about why these are not failures that are “worrysome” at first/in most cases.
To be clear, this part:
… is also intended as a falsifiable prediction. Like, if we go look at the anomaly and there’s no new thing going on there, then that’s a very big strike against expected utility theory.
This particular type of fallback-prediction is a common one in general: we have some theory which makes predictions, but “there’s a phenomenon which breaks one of the modelling assumption in a way noncentral to the main theory” is a major way the predictions can fail. But then we expect to be able to go look and find the violation of that noncentral modelling assumption, which would itself yield some interesting information. If we don’t find such a violation, it’s a big strike against the theory.
That’s a great way of framing it! And a great way of thinking about why these are not failures that are “worrysome” at first/in most cases.