By contrast, if “it’s hard to even think of how experiments would be relevant to what I’m doing,” you have precisely zero means of ever determining that your theories are inappropriate for the question at hand.
Here, you’ve gotten too hyperbolic about what I said. When I say “experiments”, I don’t mean “any contact with reality”. And when I said “what I’m doing”, I didn’t mean “anything I will ever do”. Some people I talk to seem to think it’s weird that I never run PyTorch, and that’s the kind of thing where I can’t think of how it would be relevant to what I’m currently doing.
When trying to formulate conjectures, I am constantly fretting about whether various assumptions match reality well enough. And when I do have a theory that is at the point where it’s making strong claims, I will start to work out concrete ways to apply it.
But I don’t even have one yet, so there’s not really anything to check. I’m not sure how long people are expecting this to take, and this difference in expectation might be one of the implicit things driving the confusion. As many theorems there are that end up in the dustbin, there is even more pre-theorem work that end up in the dustbin. I’ve been at this for three and change years, and I would not be surprised if it takes a few more years. But the entire point is to apply it, so I can certainly imagine conditions under which we end up finding out whether the theory applies to reality.
Here, you’ve gotten too hyperbolic about what I said. When I say “experiments”, I don’t mean “any contact with reality”. And when I said “what I’m doing”, I didn’t mean “anything I will ever do”. Some people I talk to seem to think it’s weird that I never run PyTorch, and that’s the kind of thing where I can’t think of how it would be relevant to what I’m currently doing.
When trying to formulate conjectures, I am constantly fretting about whether various assumptions match reality well enough. And when I do have a theory that is at the point where it’s making strong claims, I will start to work out concrete ways to apply it.
But I don’t even have one yet, so there’s not really anything to check. I’m not sure how long people are expecting this to take, and this difference in expectation might be one of the implicit things driving the confusion. As many theorems there are that end up in the dustbin, there is even more pre-theorem work that end up in the dustbin. I’ve been at this for three and change years, and I would not be surprised if it takes a few more years. But the entire point is to apply it, so I can certainly imagine conditions under which we end up finding out whether the theory applies to reality.