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Comment by drran | Hacker News Reader

> To put it plainly, neural nets can't come up with scientific theories, but they can estimate probabilities of things happening. But scientists can and want to come up with scientific theories, not just predictions.

Current science is famous for "shut up and calculate" principle.

- Foo, bar, baz, ...

- But why?

- Shut up and calculate!

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As I understand it, that just applies to quantum mechanics. For example, in computer science, we certainly try to prove the properties of algorithms, such as their computational complexity or their soundness and completeness etc.

There seems to be a lot of disagreement on this. I would appreciate a correction very much, if that's possible.

This is not meant to be personally offensive. I normally wouldn't be this blunt, but I was one of the downvoters and you asked for feedback.

Your comment comes across as arrogant and ignorant. I have not formally studied quantum mechanics, but I do know theoretical physics is all about identifying and testing theories to better explain phenomenon. And the tests are statistically rigorous.

This is a thread specifically regarding an AI getting a wrong answer and practitioners suddenly deciding it's discovered new physics. Yet you claim CS is rigorous and quantum mechanics is not.

There is a tendency of someone well learned in one subject (eg CS) deciding that makes them an expert on any subject they casually observe. This is very off-putting.

Thanks for the explanation and I appreciate the candour. I am really surprised by what you say. I didn't expect that my comment would come across as arrogant and ignorant. I'm not an expert on physics, and I started my comment by saying "as far as I understand it". Reading it again I can't see that the language I used is particularly emotionally, or otherwise, charged.

I also absolutely did not try to claim that "CS is rigorous and quantum mechanics is not", as you took my comment to mean. The conversation here is not about rigour, or at least I didn't realise it was about rigour. Is the "shut up and calculate" dictum about rigour? In the context of the conversation and without looking it up I took it to mean that we should not try to understand and only try to calculate. I didn't put any more meaning on it.

I think you (I don't know about the other users who downvoted my comment) misunderstood both the meaning and the intent of my comment. May I suggest that clarifications should be sought, in the future?

Not that it will kill me to have my comments downvoted once in a while, it's just that this time I really didn't understand what I got so wrong.

EDIT:

>> There is a tendency of someone well learned in one subject (eg CS) deciding that makes them an expert on any subject they casually observe. This is very off-putting.

I'm with you on that, but I think if you look through my comments you'll see that I generally only discuss things I know. In particular with physics, I read but not comment on such conversations because I'm really not an expert.

I already upvoted your first comment and just upvoted this one.

I wasn't telling you what your comment meant to you personally -- only you know that. I was telling you how it came across and likely the reason it was downvoted significantly. I think a lot of people here don't have a lot of time to give feedback when they see an off-putting comment. And usually if someone has a counter-argument they'll say something instead of downvote. It's a good rule of thumb to consider how a tweet comes across that you may not have meant if it is just downvoted and not replied to.

Thanks! I took your explanation as intended, from what I see. But I just had to express my surprise :)

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