I came to argue in favor of aj7's argument as a physicist. I think we are all missing the forest for the trees here. what elevates the gravitational law to it's status and differentiates it from a simple model, and what i think the point that aj7 is trying to make, and also the point that norvig is choosing not to focus on here, is not the gravitational constant G. Noone really cares about the value of the constant and how it is approximated in this part of our spacetime etc [edit: of course they do care if it is postive, zero, or negative for reasons consistent to what i am saying later]. The "juice" here is the inverse square relation to length. The form of the equation is what is the deep insight and what also provides for that insight to transfer to other systems. Knowing the nature of the differential equation is of uttermost importance because then we can reason about possible and impossible outcomes of it just from it's mathematical (and only) nature. If these models in the future can be built in ways that they can be reasoned about symbolically like these systems that we strive for in physics, i think they will be elevated to laws (or proper theories as aj7 says) rather than models. and noone will care if they have a billion parameters as long as they have a certain structure that we can work with. I hope this makes some sense to support the counter-norvig argument in this (and i personally respect both chomsky and norvig infinitely of course. i just think norvig's wording in this specific part of the article is indeed crude and shallow, maybe just to make his counterargument)
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