I have a hard time telling theories which are bad ones due to inappropriately flexibility apart from theories which are good ones but work in conditions with incomplete data or necessarily limited assumptions etc. Are there any good formalized notions of flexibility that do work distinguishing these?
There are formalized notions of flexibility for models which generally use concepts like “degrees of freedom”. However they are limited in that they don’t take account of the “hidden flexibility” stemming from things like the garden of the forking paths or the filedrawer bias.
Theories have additional issues—like not being sufficiently well formalized.
I have a hard time telling theories which are bad ones due to inappropriately flexibility apart from theories which are good ones but work in conditions with incomplete data or necessarily limited assumptions etc. Are there any good formalized notions of flexibility that do work distinguishing these?
There are formalized notions of flexibility for models which generally use concepts like “degrees of freedom”. However they are limited in that they don’t take account of the “hidden flexibility” stemming from things like the garden of the forking paths or the filedrawer bias.
Theories have additional issues—like not being sufficiently well formalized.