If that’s what it sounds like then that is a failure of my description: the problem is nothing at all like overfitting, and casting it in that light would be pointless.
How many free parameters do "the foundations of physics" allow?
I was concerned a few years back when a "blip" at CERN resulted in theoretical physicists publishing 300+ different theories to explain it in a short period of time. All of these theories were presumably consistent with "the foundations of physics". And I guess that "blip" got rejected as a not something worth explaining anyway.
Calling it ”overfitting” is actually you overfitting your model of how theory works on this one concept from machine learning.
The actual events of the 750 GeV peak are much closer to neural networks hallucinating, and the diversity of models created doesen’t strike me as evidence of overfitting...
Anyway, you clearly didn’t trust my summary, and I no longer trust you have an honest interest in learning more, so I’ll stop here.
Look at this: theorists come up with something like 300 different models, and you declare they all used the same theory to do it? Of course they didn't! Why would you assume they all did the same thing?!
Further, of the various frameworks used, many will have been created by imposing some further symmetry on the standard theory, in effect decreasing the number of free parameters!
I was concerned a few years back when a "blip" at CERN resulted in theoretical physicists publishing 300+ different theories to explain it in a short period of time. All of these theories were presumably consistent with "the foundations of physics". And I guess that "blip" got rejected as a not something worth explaining anyway.
Sounds like post-hoc overfitting to me.