> identifying whether or not these physical assumptions covary is not that easy But still tractable, I'd say. My core claim is that counting independently-vari

> identifying whether or not these physical assumptions covary is not that easy But still tractable, I'd say. My core claim is that counting independently-variable assumptions will be a highly performant way to select between theories which agree with the data. Or put another way, it's the best Fermi approximation calculation for measuring "how good is your theory". How you do that for any given theory, while important to do correctly, is an implementation detail which I think is secondary to the discussion of whether doing it at all is a good idea. :) (seems like we might agree that it is?) > We can incorporate (partial) evidence from past elections, but it's going to be very sensitive to the priors To the extent that election forecasts are unreliable, I think that's because they are forced to involve a lot of assumptions (e.g. similarity to past elections) that turn out not to correspond well to reality. Models which make fewer such assumptions will do likely do better! (and IMO fivethirtyeight's forecasts did the best job of this out of any; most of the rest put Hillary at around 97%). Unfortunately with elections, there is a comparatively high lower bound on the number of assumptions we must make, thanks to the complexity of their dynamics and sparsity of data/knowledge we have about each. I think this is much less the case with physics, where we are varying comparatively small physical assumptions to explain mountains of data. But in either case, I contend that the most performant models will make fewer (unmeasured) independent assumptions. > How much evidence do we need before we can be confident the "belief levels" we're throwing around aren't that subjective anymore? The point I'm trying to make is bigger-picture than the above level of detail: Counting independent assumptions, in the limit, matters more than the specific constants of each assumption (assuming they're not low/zero), precisely because it's so hard to come up with "accurate" numbers for each. That is to say, the probability is not sensitive to those belief levels: We could choose widely varying distributions for the probabilities of our assumptions, including choosing probabilities very close to 1, and it will hardly ever matter to the total probability as much as the absolute number of independent assumptions we make.