alt Hacker NewsThis is really interesting, but it appears to hinge on an unstated (and unjustified) assumption: that scientists learn by back propagation, or something sufficiently similar that back propagation is a reasonable model.
It also:
* Bakes in the assumption that there are no internal mechanisms to be discovered ("Each environment is a mixture of multivariate Gaussian distributions")
* Ignores the possibility that their model of falsification is inadequate (they just test more near points with high error).
* Does a lot of "hopeful naming" which makes the results easy to misinterpret as saying more about like-named things in the real world than it actually does.
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According to Popper, scientists learn by putting out theories and then trying to falsify them through experiments.
The existence of "experiments" to choose from in the first place is already theory-given. As soon as you've formulated a space of such experiments to explore, almost all your theory work is done.