I thought this was a quite insightful article - and was surprised to find so much criticism in the comments. e.g. those who are attacking his parable on the grounds that "actually the odds aren't actual 50-50 in chess" or "an alien would have to wonder why some people win more than others"... these objections seem like nit-picking to me and miss the opportunity to broaden our perspectives. The example is to help illustrate and illuminate an intriguing idea which does merit consideration: that the scientific method and various aspects of the scientific process are very much a "gradient descent" algorithm which will tend to converge to a local minimum... the large jumps needed to discover the "global minimum" are not sufficiently rewarded... or may not even be within our capabilities!

Here is a more concrete example I have been considering recently: The principal of least action can be derived from Newton's force laws. Alternatively, Newton's force laws can be derived from the principal of least action. Therefore, you could choose to make either "law" the more fundamental one and consider the other to be an emergent phenomena. Might this also apply to, e.g. the principals of thermodynamics? Might it be that all of the laws of physics are actually just an emergent phenomena that can be derived directly from the information theoretic properties of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy?

But then, why even stop there? We choose/discover these examples because our tiny, mediocre brains can only understand the universe from that point of view, whereas the actual universe we live in is unimaginably vast and complex. But might there be a way, for example, of deriving the laws of physics from some narrative principal (e.g. "we live in the best of all possible worlds... therefore by some chain of reasoning: F = ma!"). Maybe that chain of reasoning is only comprehensible to an artificial intelligence which we have yet to invent, involving us inhabiting some element of a vast fractal structure subject to some sort of anthropic principal?

And in general, it is worth considering the concept that not all things which are "true" are objectively measurable - those are just the things that are easiest to prove are true. To give an example of something which you know is true but which is, almost by definition, subjective: the existence of your own consciousness! It is impossible to prove, objectively, that you're not just some simulation that is running in a computer that's about to run out of memory and segfault... that you yourself are "real".

That's not to say that any of the above is actually true... but it might be true. Our recent focus on "provability" and "objectivity" has been used to argue that such things are in fact false, or just not worth considering or thinking about. There is sometimes an arrogance when there should be humility. Just because something might be exponentially difficult to prove, the sheer difficulty in proving it does not mean that it is not true.... There may be things which are true which we will never have the resources to discover. I think it's all worth considering.