[tech_ken]

My hot take is that mathematical and scientific 'soundness' is ultimately more of an aesthetic preference than an objective quality of reality. Good science makes sense to humans, and 'what makes sense' is ultimately what fits satisfyingly in your brain. There's nothing inherently wrong with an enormous epicycle model of reality from the perspective of the God of Math; so long as your formal system is consistent and expressive enough to represent everything then meh, it's a model. But the model that humans want to elevate to canonical status has far stricter requirements, and ultimately it's the one which the majority of sufficiently credentialed tastemakers decide is 'best'. Parsimony works well in physics where you have closed form expressions for all your stuff, but the biology cases are so much messier because it turns out that sometimes reality isn't parsimonious. All this to say that good science is a matter of taste, and while AI can gist the broad strokes of taste I've yet to see it take on the role of genuine tastemaker.

[genxy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Variations_on_a_Proof

[card_zero]

If biology, or some other subject area, is inherently, irredeemably hard to explain, and always will be, then I don't care about it much, because it doesn't mean very much. I care about explanations, not "reality" in the sense of every arbitrary muddle of knotted nerve fibers and confused flour beetles. If all the world's messy, inexplicable things were to gang up and cause us trouble such that we have to pay them attention, we can still ultimately deal with them in the ways that matter by using clarity and the things we can explain well.

[tim333]

>...nothing inherently wrong with an enormous epicycle model of reality...

That would be pretty hopeless for launching satellites and the like.

[tech_ken]

What use does the God of Math have for satellites and the like?

[tim333]

Well maybe not much for the God of math but Newtonian mechanics is more practical for life, beyond just matters of taste.