When Einstein invented General Relativity, he had almost no experimental data to go on, except the precession of Mercury’s perihelion. And (AFAIK) Einstein did not use that data, except at the end.
Eliezer, I’d love to believe that too, but from the accounts I’ve read I don’t think it’s quite right. Because of his “hole argument”, Einstein took a long detour from the correct path in 1913-1915. During that time, he abandoned his principle of general covariance, and tried to find field equations that would “work well enough in practice anyway.” Apparently, one of the main reasons he finally abandoned that line of thought, and returned to general covariance, is that he was getting a prediction for Mercury’s perihelion motion that was too small by a factor of 2.
So is it possible that not even Einstein was a Bayesian superintelligence?
When Einstein invented General Relativity, he had almost no experimental data to go on, except the precession of Mercury’s perihelion. And (AFAIK) Einstein did not use that data, except at the end.
Eliezer, I’d love to believe that too, but from the accounts I’ve read I don’t think it’s quite right. Because of his “hole argument”, Einstein took a long detour from the correct path in 1913-1915. During that time, he abandoned his principle of general covariance, and tried to find field equations that would “work well enough in practice anyway.” Apparently, one of the main reasons he finally abandoned that line of thought, and returned to general covariance, is that he was getting a prediction for Mercury’s perihelion motion that was too small by a factor of 2.
So is it possible that not even Einstein was a Bayesian superintelligence?