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Cornell Team Says It's Unified the Structure of Scientific Theories

An anonymous reader writes "Cornell physicists say they've codified why science works, or more specifically, why scientific theories work – a meta-theory. Publishing online in the journal Science (abstract), the team has developed a unified computational framework they say exposes the hidden hierarchy of scientific theories by quantifying the degree to which predictions – like how a particular cellular mechanism might work under certain conditions, or how sound travels through space – depend on the detailed variables of a model."

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  1. Re:Possible answer by VortexCortex · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    As a cyberneticist and information theorist I was right with you on science (or signal processing in general) being a form of (de)compression until you went bat-shit insane:

    The brain contains an id, an ego, and a superego which have their own goals and weaknesses, and from this we can predict the general behaviour of people.

    Prove it! When I look in a head I see a complex neuronal network. I don't find "id" or "ego" or "superego" or any other unfalsifiable bullshit.

    The problem is that we don't have any way to measure how good a theory is, or even whether it is any good at all

    Fool. How accurately the theory predicts actual outcomes in reality is the measure of a theory. As for your other philosophical bullishit: Protip: That's not a science. It's not based in reality. The way you determine which observations are outliers is not with an eye of the researcher, but with a statistics. The way to determine whether the results are significant is to distinguish them from random noise: It's why we have the Standard Deviations, and degrees of certainty (sigma).

    I would continue, but it's clear you're just talking out your fool ass.

    Here's some philosophy for you: We are all the same universe, each phenomena an event reflecting upon the one self; We record echoes of our experience and others find them familiar, thus science is done.