alt Hacker NewsThis is why I'm skeptical of theories like Wolfram's: It feels like an overfit based on this: It produces all sorts of known theories (special relativity, parts of QM, gravity etc), but doesn't make new testable predictions, or new fundamentals. When I see 10 predictions emerge from the theory, and they all happen to be ones we already known of... Overfit.
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Jonathan Gorard goes through a handful of testable predictions for the hypergraph stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLtxXkugd5w
I don't know anything about Wolfram's theory, but one general way to address this is to compare the Akaike information criterion (or similar measures).
The metrics attempt to balance the ability of a model to fit data with the number of parameters required. For equally well-fitting models, they prefer the one with fewer params.
If Wolfram's theory fits as well but has fewer params, it should be preferred. I'm not sure if fewer "concepts" counts, but it's something to consider.
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But that means we'd prefer whichever theory our species had landed on first. Basing our preference for a theory on that timing seems kind of arbitrary to me. If they're the same in other respects, I'd take a look at both sides to see if there are other compelling reasons to focus on one or the other, such as which is simpler. Of course if they make different predictions that'd be even better, time to get to testing :)